by Howard Curtis

Although not especially well known outside Italy, Beppe Fenoglio is considered one of the most significant Italian writers of the period immediately after World War II. Emerging as he did from the anti-Fascist partisan movement, he wrote mostly (though not exclusively) about the war years. When his novel A Private Affair was published posthumously in 1963 (he had died tragically young, at the age of forty, two months earlier), it was acclaimed as one of the finest works of fiction ever produced about the partisan struggle. The great writer Italo Calvino, himself a former partisan, called it “the novel our generation wished we had created”. In the decades since its publication, it has become established as a classic of modern Italian literature and has been filmed no fewer than three times.

But this is no simple story of heroic partisans and evil Fascists. There are few heroes or villains in Fenoglio’s world, just ordinary people with all their faults, engaged in a grim struggle they sometimes barely understand. The novel’s plot avoids politics or ideology, concentrating, as the title suggests, on the private rather than the public. The protagonist, a young partisan named Milton, discovers that Fulvia, the girl he was in love with before the war, may have been sleeping with his best friend, Giorgio. He sets off to find Giorgio and get the truth from him, only to discover that Giorgio has just been captured by the Fascists. So now he embarks on a cross-country journey in search of a Fascist prisoner who can be exchanged for his friend. As he moves through a bleak landscape of fog, rain and mud, the war is pushed into the background and Milton’s “private affair” takes centre stage. As he himself puts it, “Nothing else matters to me anymore. All of a sudden, nothing matters. War, freedom, my comrades, the enemy. There’s only one truth now.”   

Fenoglio vividly depicts a world of constant discomfort and ever-present danger, a world where a cowshed is the warmest place to sleep, where an egg is a decent meal, and where to still be alive at the age of thirty is a great achievement. It is a world Fenoglio knew from personal experience, having fought with the partisans when he was only in his early twenties. It was his own great achievement to have transmuted that experience into a work that is uniquely gripping and readable and that has lost none of its power since it first appeared.  

---

A Private Affair

• by Beppe Fenoglio
• Translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis
• Original title: Una questione privata (1963)
• 153 pages
• Publisher: New York Review Books (2023)
• ISBN: 978-1-68137-674-5
• Treat your bookshelf to a taste of Italy! Order the book here.  

Read a review of A Private Affair on Full Stop.

---

---

---