Customer Reviews

Men and Not Men

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PUBLISHERS REVIEW states that MEN AND NOT MEN emerged in post-war Italy as part of a neo-realist wave of literature and film promoting the democratic aims of a new, open society, but they only got it partly right. MEN AND NOT MEN is not a journalistic period piece nor 2 dimensional naturalism prevalent among socialist realists. This novel is readable, clear and resonant in a world still fraught with bloody civil strife and factional war. MEN AND NOT MEN depicts the struggle over political violence even for the most just of causes, against a murderous fascism. Certainly works by authors such as Elio Vitorrini, Anna Seghers of Germany, Jorge Semprun of Spain, Charlotte Delbo of France and others who lived through fascism on the continent speak with a veracity that second-hand pop literature from America hasn't even approached. MEN AND NOT MEN deals with the contradictions and struggles related to justifiable political violence on several levels by incorporating into the straightforward chronology of the novel dream sequences, the voices of the dead, interpolations of the author, and other techniques common among contemporary post-modern writers. Stylistically seamless, the novel is fluid treatment of people living and dying in a raw time when everything changed.

A raw and gripping picture of the struggle between the fascists (not men) and the resistance movement (men) in Milan in 1944: assaults, arrests, interrogations, tortures. An atmosphere of terror evoked in short, dazzling, implacable, staccato phrases. A masterpiece.