Lyrical Mastery

In an article I previously wrote about meeting Erri De Luca for the first time, I mentioned that he was a master of lyrical prose based on my reading of his novel God’s Mountain (2002). In his latest novel, The Day Before Happiness, also translated by Michael F. Moore, what struck me most was not so much the lyricism and the laconic nature of his prose, but the structure and narrative of the text. Clearly, De Luca is indebted to the poetics of prose (if not to poetry) since there are no fewer than fifty instances in which he uses similes and an almost equal number of metaphors. It’s apparent, too, that the use of such poetic devices is a kind of mainstay of his art. For example, De Luca has his Jewish character who has been surviving in the sewers of Naples during World War II saying,

The insolent sky of September 1943: a tablecloth with embroidered borders, fresh and clean without a speck of dust, a stain. An unblinking turquoise: come down to earth a bit, sky, let’s trade places, why don’t you take up there all the filth and spread your tablecloth down here on earth. A vicious, distant sky, not like today, that started at the rooftops. The uprising began when it started to rain, as if the city were waiting for an agreed sign or that the sky was closing. And the Americans stopped bombing.

As in God’s Mountain, De Luca relies heavily on poetic tropes if not in quantity, then in degree to tell the tale. One discovers numerous examples in which De Luca uses such rhetorical devices as anadiplosis or the repetition of a word at the end of a clause or at the beginning of another; anaphora or the repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses; or anastrophe which is the inversion of the usual word order within a sentence. These devices contribute to the lyricism of his prose, which gives it the kind of poetic quality I’ve suggested.

But, as I alluded to, the narrative in The Day Before Happiness is somewhat redolent of God’s Mountain especially in relation to the characters and how said characters are characterized. For example, instead of the “magically real” winged mentor, Don Rafaniello, we get the “magically real” doorman mentor, Don Gaetano; instead of the narrator’s first love, Maria, we have the narrator’s first love, Anna, who is also the focal point of “the day before happiness”; instead of the good carpenter, Master Errico, we have the good bookseller, Don Raimondo; instead of the unnamed Neapolitan narrator in God’s Mountain, we have the unnamed narrator, ’a scigna, the monkey, in Day Before Happiness. Likewise, there are repetitions of other themes: a dysfunctional if not absent nuclear family; the acknowledgement of sexual desire; unexpected erections; the allusion to Argentina (which also appears in Three Horses [1999]); the persecution of Jews (as witnessed by the Jew who lives in the sewers during the war); instead of Don Rafaniello who has wings, Don Gaetano can read thoughts, and, lastly, instead of a boomerang, there is a knife. Recalling Anton Chekhov’s dictum that if a gun is seen in the first act, it must be used by the last, so too are the boomerang and knife (though the latter isn’t proffered at the outset) used by the end of their respective novels. As in God’s Mountain, the tale initially appears to be a memoir or a Bildungsroman until we realize at the end of the novel that it is more like a coming-of-age novel highlighting episodes from the narrator’s childhood to the end of his teens and not any kind of document recording the narrator’s life from youth to adulthood.

The language is very much De Lucan in that one reads the lyrical nature of the work and how much the language (even in translation) is...