‘The detail swallows the drama’ – How I Lost the War by Filippo Bologna

Pushkin Press sent me a copy of How I Lost The War to review as part the blog tour for Filippo Bologna’s début novel (translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis). Having read the book and formed a less-than-positive impression of it, I’m slightly uncomfortable with this. Most blog tours that I’ve been involved with (in my non-Bookmunch capacity) have been hosted by acquaintances of the writer in question; they’re word-of-mouth marketing exercises, often associated with the smaller presses that don’t have huge publicity engines behind them, and therefore the participants tend to be chosen deliberately to ensure a pretty favourable and positive response to the text. Which is fine, if everybody’s being above board and honest; I’ve taken part in blog-tours in situations when I’ve been genuinely able to say that I enjoyed the book and have been glad to review the book, interview the author or whatever other form the tour’s taken. But what happens when a novel’s sent out cold to people like ourselves with no affiliation to Bologna or Pushkin? We’ve agreed to be part of the tour, but I didn’t like the book. The usual review scenario takes this possibility into account when sending out advance copies – you can’t please all the people – but the blog-tour seems to me to imply a degree of assumed positivity. Now, I’m reluctant to tone down any negative impressions I’ve formed just because I know the review might be used as part of a publicity drive for the novel. It’s an offshoot of an issue that crops up again and again in reviewing, with some people (or media outlets) reluctant to discuss books that they can’t be honestly positive about; there’s a fear that a critically negative review could be viewed as hostile or simply unnecessary. I’d disagree with that position, because I think that as long as the criticism is backed-up with reference to the text, it’s providing a useful service to the reader who looks to review culture as a pre-purchase filtering mechanism. But the whole blog-tour business muddies the waters. Do the organisers want an honest opinion or a fluff-piece? Will they link to the piece if it’s not gushing? I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Anyway, enough of this meta-review waffling; let’s get onto the book itself. How I Lost The War is a family saga and love-story crossed with Italian social history, a dash of eco-terrorism and a large scoop of anti-capitalism ranting. It’s the story of Fede Cremona, the last remaining son of a rich Tuscan dynasty (they’ve even got their own castle), who’s unhappy with his family’s complicity in the way their town has been taken over by Ottone Gattai, a canny capitalist who’s developing the whole area as a lucrative spa town. Fede and his girlfriend Lea head up a band of revolutionaries who embark on a violent guerilla war against the developers, but their campaign is futile against the unstoppable force of Gattai’s ambition. Fede is our first-person narrator and his account is a mixture of idealistic, anti-capitalist rage and nostalgia for an idyllic countryside that no longer exists. He mixes up his own story with that of his great-grandfather, also Fede, who grew up under the rise of Fascism in Italy; Fede (the younger) is convinced that their destinies are intertwined and that he must carry on his ancestor’s fight, though we know from the book’s title that his struggle is doomed to fail.

First, the good: Bologna’s got a knack for identifying the ludicrous and the silly in any situation; the book’s full of tiny observations about the quirks of village life, Fede’s neighbours and petty local politics and bureaucracy, so it’s pretty funny in places. Gattai’s buy-out is so demented that it’s brilliant – he secures the rights to all water in the vicinity, so he can commandeer your shower if he takes a fancy to it. Fede’s uncle is left crying in an emptied-out swimming-pool after the Cremonas’ assets are seized. It’s simultaneously awful and hilarious; Bologna’s skilled at highlighting the humour in bleak situations, and vice versa. Also, the descriptions of the Tuscan landscape are luscious, and there’s plenty of detail about how the Fascist system overtook small communities that might interest history buffs. And Bologna’s great at setting up a sinister situation – the opening chapter is especially compelling, as it draws us into a beautiful rural scene that’s  laden with menace and fear. 

But, the bad: he might have the set-up sorted, but he’s not too wonderful with the follow-through. Though we open with this incredibly powerful scene of a dog trapped underground and barking pitifully until it dies, the pace immediately slackens and the tone becomes more conversational. The reader (well, this reader) wanted to hear what happened to the dog and why, but instead we’re launched into a meandering history of the village and the Cremonas’ place within it. We hop back and forth between the two Fedes’ stories – between the rise of Fascism and the rise of Gattai (which, incidentally, I thought was a pretty heavy-handed way of drawing a parallel between greedy capitalism and repressive politics). And the result was that any incipient tension was drained out of the text. Too many stories are being dragged out at one and they weaken each other; both of the main story-lines (the adventures of the two Fedes) chug along and stop and start so much that whenever something seems to gain momentum, it’s lost in Bologna’s urge to throw in more local colour. The detail swallows the drama. One example that especially grated was the elder Fede’s death; it’s supposedly critical both to the younger Fede’s self-conception and to how the Cremona family subsequently developed over the twentieth century, but it’s only dealt with once, early on, and it’s such an insignificant event that it’s massively anti-climactic. Perhaps, of course, that’s the point – our destiny hangs on random and dull events – but as far as sustaining the readers’ interest goes, it’s not exactly a dramatic success. And this problem continues. There’s a lack of engagement with the narrative. We know that Gattai will win, but because Fede can’t seem to concentrate on his own story, it’s hard to drum up interest in the details of his failure. And the timeline is unclear. The chapters are short and non-chronological but not very well signposted, so I had a hard time figuring out the order of many of the events – when Fede met Lea, for instance, and how long they were together. Maybe I’m not the brightest reader, but I did  think there was some clarity lacking here. And – speaking of Lea – like all the women in the novel, she’s one-dimensional and inscrutable. There seems to be a steady thread of mysogyny floating through Fede’s narrative, with lines like ‘The very fact of knowing, of sensing a man’s eyes on her, makes her consciously more beautiful and more mischievous.’ Lea’s the only woman in there with any agency, but her actions aren’t really grounded in anything understandable – she leaves Fede for no discernible reason at all, so it just reads like a plot device that’ll get him good and embittered, rather than an organic result of her character and/or circumstances.

Any Cop? I’d say no, unless you’re really interested in fictionalised Italian history or anti-capitalist diatribes. The writing’s not outstanding and the characters are fairy wooden. It’s got its funny bits and some very evocative scenes, but they don’t make up for the rambling, grumbly narrative. Plus there’s a typo spelling the author’s name wrong on the spine. What – me, pernickity?