Description

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A powerful World War II novel about a young soldier joining the anti-German resistance in occupied Italy, this classic—which touches on everything from wartime dangers and adventures to desperate love—is regarded as one of the greatest works of twentieth-century Italian literature.

Milton—the name is a nom de guerre—is a member of a partisan band battling Italian Fascists and German forces in the chaotic last years of World War II. Before the war Milton was a student of English literature and a lover of poetry. He was in love with a girl, too, Fulvia, and from time to time she’d invite him over to her rich family’s fine house and have him read to her. Now, in the thick of war, he discovers that handsome Giorgio, his friend and fellow partisan, was sleeping with Fulvia at the time. Furious with jealousy, Milton hastens to have it out with Giorgio, but Giorgio has been captured by the Germans. A Private Affair tells the story of Milton’s mad quest—through mud and fog, rain and terror, while barely evading enemy patrols—to rescue his friend, the better to settle a grudge from a lost world of peace. Beppe Fenoglio’s masterpiece is a peerless story of the violent heart and world.

About the Author

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Beppe Fenoglio (1922–1963) was born into a working- class family in Alba, in the Piedmontese region of Italy, the son of a butcher. He enrolled in the University of Turin in 1940 (he would never receive his degree) and in January 1943 he was conscripted into the Italian army. Later that same year, following the German occupation of Italy, he and his brother Walter joined the partisan Resistance. A disastrous battle between partisans and Fascists forced the brothers to take refuge in the family home; the whole family was arrested and soon released, apart from the two young men, who were only freed as part of an exchange of prisoners. Fenoglio worked for a wine firm after the war and began to write. The Twenty-Three Days of the Town of Alba was published in 1952. It was followed by Ruins and Spring of Beauty, which won the Prato Prize in 1960. Fenoglio contracted lung cancer in 1962 and died the following year, just before his forty-first birthday. Some of his most famous works, including Johnny the Partisan, Saturday’s Pay, and A Private Affair, were published posthumously, through the efforts of friends and scholars.

Howard Curtis lives in Norwich, England. He has translated more than a hundred books, mostly fiction, from Italian, French, and Spanish. The many Italian writers he has translated include Luigi Pirandello, Leonardo Sciascia, Gianrico Carofiglio, Giorgio Scerbanenco, and Gianfranco Calligarich.

Praise For…

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"A Private Affair has the geometric tension of a romance of mad lovers and chivalric pursuits like Orlando Furioso, and at the same time it presents the Resistance exactly as it was, inside and out, as truly as it has ever been written . . . with all the moral values and emotions (the more powerful, the more implicit) and fury." —Italo Calvino

"Superb and superbly exciting." —Paul Bailey

"No other modern Italian author has managed to produce such tellingly unstable fiction, while sustaining such a powerful narrative drive." —Peter Hainsworth, TLS