Carmela Circelli’s Love and Rain (Guernica, 2023) is a beautifully written novel often soaked in mood. I wanted to swallow it whole, but at the same time, I wanted to savour it. So I read it as slowly as I could.
In today’s world, every Italian novel and especially those by women, will inevitably be compared with Elena Ferrante. Yet, it was Carlo Levi and Cesare Pavese who came to mind as I read, though both wrote in a quieter style. It relates the personal histories of three women: Chiara, Francesca and Micola. Chiara and Francesca’s stories are recounted in their own voices. Micola’s instead is told by Francesca, then taken up by Cassandra, who cares for her during a long convalescence. Francesca is the more politically involved, her sister Micola a gifted singer. The much younger Chiara seems unmoored, cast adrift. How her life intersects with Francesca and Micola dawns very slowly. The novel could be seen as her story, as she comes to understand, but only to a degree, a history that had been obscured from her. But the novel could also be read as Francesca’s story, the recounting of her life which leads from youthful rebellion to the fringes of a terrorist cell. It could also be the story of the beautiful Micola, whose talent for singing turns to silence for years.
The children of peasants who immigrated to Montreal, Francesca and Micola bear the scars of class and of their parents’ illiteracy. At one point the very political Francesca reduces all their struggles to a single source: “Everything had gone wrong for us, and it relieved my suffering to see a single cause for it all, the injustices suffered by Italy’s South.” In truth her suffering issues from multiple origins, but she is not wrong in identifying this as the deepest wound. I thought of Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, whose title came from an expression used by the people of Aliano, the village in Lucania to which he was exiled by Mussolini’s Fascist regime. “We’re not Christian, they say. Christ stopped at Eboli. Christian means, in their language, a man, a human being. And that phrase I heard repeated so many times, in their mouths is perhaps nothing more than the expression of the most dejected sense of inferiority.” So Levi reported. If Love and Rain were not a fiction, it would be a record of the wounds of the problema meridionale inherited by a new and younger generation and translated to the New World. In saying this, I hope I’m not reducing Francesca and Micola to simplified figures, to a stereotype. In this novel, each life is individual, marked and marred by specific pasts, by particular choices, by paths taken or not taken, by a suffering and pain that no-one else can take up and endure.
And so her novel differs profoundly from Levi’s memoir. In the pages of Christ Stopped at Eboli, Levi observes the routinely miserable lives around him. He intervenes when he can, often acting as the local doctor. But he is an object of fascination, not one of them. Even in internal exile, he leads a richer life. Life has allowed him an education and an imagination. His exile will eventually end, while the inhabitants of Aliano will continue to eke out an existence, impoverished in every way. Perhaps this inch of detachment allowed Levi’s lucid and stylish prose. None of the characters in Circelli’s novel are observers. None see a way out. They truly are the inheritors of a peasant misery that constricts their lives and is carved into their bodies. Circelli writes of “the almost biological pessimism” of their family’s village. Their exile from wealth, from power, from the riches of Italian culture – and Canada’s too, for that matter – will never end. If that inch of detachment allowed Levi’s beautiful prose, the lack of it leads here to a way of writing that is emphatically materialist whether speaking of Chiara’s intensity of feeling, of sexuality, or the looming threatening natural world.
The novel is made of three large chapters followed by a shorter one, a coda really, but not one that ties everything up in a neat bow. The book is in some sense discontinuous. If it were a film, it would exist as series of very long takes jammed up against each other by jump cuts. Each of the three main chapters plunges the reader into the midst of things without a map. Each is devoted to a single individual voice recounting events as best they can: first Chiara, then Francesca, then Cassandra. And finally Chiara once more. Each time we’re thrown into a new voice, a new geography, a new situation. No obvious path leads from one chapter to another. Even the name of the person recounting events appears only after a period of delay or suspension. This mirrors the experience of the characters: the world is not given to them in a tidy package. The characters – and to an extent, the readers – are buffeted by a world which is not, in the end, possible to know or control. They – and we – are immersed.
This immersion is often intensified by the surrounding natural world. As the novel begins, a blizzard rages around Chiara. It strikes as she ends her relationship with her lover Daniel, leaving for reasons which escape her. The storm lashes her, brings down power lines. Shattered trees litter Toronto’s streets, the city freezes in the dark. When winter turns to summer, torrential rains flood the subway and underpasses. The wind shrieks, the willow tree in the courtyard of her apartment block is split in two. Writers are often warned against relying on the pathetic fallacy, where human feelings are projected onto natural phenomena. Usually this is a sentimentalizing shortcut into a character’s interior life. But here it made sense. I experienced it as an addictive confusion. I couldn’t tell what was taking place. Was the writer projecting her protagonist’s intensity of feeling onto the natural world? Or was this was the sign of an extreme introjection, that Chiara was absorbing far too much of everything that occurred around her?
I often thought of Pavese, of his way of depicting the hills, the soil, the vines in the country south of Turin. In his hands, the landscape was what it was, and at the same time, something more, something of mythic dimension. There was a darkness to the soil that cannot be grasped by reason, a darkness which seemed to infect his characters. Love and Rain is like that, with its angry storms, its rising seas along the cliffs of Amalfi. But here this doubled dimension is spelled out where Pavese only hinted at it. Here it is exaggerated, operatic. Perhaps this is as it should be, given the climate crisis that already is breaking over our heads. I thought too of what Levi had written, that “Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause and effect, nor reason, nor history.” Perhaps this rough, truly pagan sense of nature was what Circelli’s characters’ inherited. If their parents never were part of a world understood in terms of cause and effect, if they were never granted a right to reason, then, perhaps in compensation, what was preserved for them – and also for their children – was a capacity to seize the world around them through a mythic comprehension.
I found so much to admire in this novel. This internalized, lived-out argument between reason and myth. The peasant stubbornness of its characters, their capacity to resist. Its dark moodiness, its internal dissension about whether political commitment – or instead, a pagan immersion in the natural world – is richer, more necessary. I admired especially Circelli’s refusal to write down to her audience, not to hide or diminish her characters’ intelligence in the slightest way. And one last thing: Circelli’s novel explicitly proclaims that there is a right to beauty, like the right to the city that the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre announced. This emerges only after Francesca’s long imprisonment finally comes to an end, and she reflects on the cost of political commitment. “And yes, ideology had become a prison for those of us committed to revolutionary justice,” she muses. “No one had time to stop and consider that, maybe, humans also had spiritual and psychological needs… Our own individual needs and desires should not have to be forfeited in the process of fighting for justice. Along with food and shelter and the right to work, beauty too is something we should all be entitled to. It’s not just some frivolous, bourgeois construct. It’s as necessary as air and water, and sometimes, the only antidote to the terrors and horrors of life.” In proclaiming this, Francesca does not put politics aside, but instead, begins to free herself and breath the air of a truly expansive sense of what politics could or should mean.
Andy Patton is a painter. He represented Canada in the Fifth Biennale of Sydney. In 2014, his text paintings were included in The Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art Exhibition in Xi’an, which later traveled to Beijing. He is represented by Birch Contemporary. He lives in Toronto with his wife, the artist Janice Gurney.
