Elsa Morante: il passato, la traccia e l'oblio

Stefania Lucamante

2024-01-01

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Abstract

In a century marked by persecution and genocide, Elsa Morante gives us La Storia: Romanzo (1974), a novel variously reviewed, panned, accused of pathos, but also much loved by critics as well as by some intellectuals of the time including Natalia Ginzburg and Italo Calvino. The death drive present in the community, and repeatedly affirmed by the author in various speeches such as For or Against the Atomic Bomb (1965) and certainly in the pastiche The World Saved by Children (1968), now becomes a fictional novel that takes shape in a novel not for a few, but for everyone, through clever narrative strategies that do not hesitate to approach the affiliative post-memory theorized by Marianne Hirsch and a use of time understood almost as an eternal human and universal coma.