{"product_id":"the-communist-isbn-9781681370781","title":"The Communist","description":"\u003cb\u003eA unique political coming of age story, now in English for the first time\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn NYRB Classics Original\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWalter Ferranini has been born and bred a man of the left. His father was a worker and an anarchist; Walter himself is a Communist. In the 1930s, he left Mussolini’s Italy to fight Franco in Spain. After Franco’s victory, he left Spain for exile in the United States. With the end of the war, he returned to Italy to work as a labor organizer and to build a new revolutionary order. Now, in the late 1950s, Walter is a deputy in the Italian parliament. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe is not happy about it. Parliamentary proceedings are too boring for words: the Communist Party seems to be filling up with ward heelers, timeservers, and profiteers. For Walter, the political has always taken precedence over the personal, but now there seems to be no refuge for him anywhere. The puritanical party disapproves of his relationship with Nuccia, a tender, quizzical, deeply intelligent editor who is separated but not divorced, while Walter is worried about his health, haunted by his past, and increasingly troubled by knotty questions of both theory and practice. Walter is, always has been, and always will be a Communist, he has no doubt about that, and yet something has changed. Communism no longer explains the life he is living, the future he hoped for, or, perhaps most troubling of all, the life he has led.“Rich and engrossing. . . . [Morselli’s] tale of a man whose certainties are destroyed will resonate with readers of any political persuasion.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Morselli was a man of wide culture and vast reading, a writer of  inexhaustible intellectual curiosity, possessed  of a rare talent to  evoke social or historical settings.” —Charles Fantazzi\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Morselli’s novels...are serious social studies.... The uncanny,   matter-of-fact depictions...give an eerie feeling of something utterly   impossible becoming all-too-plausible.... Why works of such calibre went   unpublished remains a mystery...his works simply remain there to be   appreciated.\" —Nicola Rossi, \u003ci\u003ecomplete review Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Morselli’s] best-laid schemes of mice and monarchs are presided over by a cool and witty intellect.\" —Christopher Wordsworth, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Morselli  possessed the pure visionary’s exactness and constructive  ability;  each time he chose a subject, he punctiliously documented  himself  thereabout...an isolated experimenter.... He could prophetically   interpret history as in \u003ci\u003eIl Comunista\u003c\/i\u003e or reverse it, with a good deal of fantastic inventiveness.\" —Alfredo Giuliani, \u003ci\u003eLiterary Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Morselli [was] a master of irony and a deft juggler of tenses.\" —Annapaola Cancogni, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eGuido Morselli \u003c\/b\u003e(1912–1973) spent his youth in Milan,  where his father was an executive with a pharmaceutical company. When he  was twelve his mother died from Spanish flu, an event that devastated  the reserved child. After attending a Jesuit-run primary school and a  classical secondary school, Morselli graduated from the Università degli  Studi di Milano with a law degree in 1935. Instead of practicing law,  however, he embarked on a long trip around the Continent. Though he  wrote consistently from the remote town in the lake region of Lombardy  where he lived alone, Morselli succeeded in publishing only two books  over the course of his life: the essays \u003ci\u003eProust o del sentimento\u003c\/i\u003e (Proust, or On Sentiment, 1943) and \u003ci\u003eRealismo e fantasia\u003c\/i\u003e (Realism and Invention, 1947). His many works of fiction, journalism,  and philosophy were repeatedly rejected by publishers, and, frustrated  by his perceived failures, he committed suicide in 1973. Hanging in his  library was the motto \u003ci\u003eEtiam si omnes, ego non\u003c\/i\u003e (Though all do it, I do not). In fact, Morselli’s nine posthumously published novels, among them \u003ci\u003eRoma senza papa\u003c\/i\u003e (Rome Without the Pope, 1974), \u003ci\u003eDivertimento 1889\u003c\/i\u003e (1975), and \u003ci\u003eDissipatio H.G.\u003c\/i\u003e (The Dissolution of the Human Race, 1977), enjoyed considerable  critical success. Morselli left his farm and lands to the town of  Gavirate in his will, and today Parco Morselli looks south onto Lago di  Varese and north toward the Alpine foothills.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrederika Randall\u003c\/b\u003e (1948–2020) was a writer, reporter, and translator. Among her translations are Ippolito Nievo’s \u003ci\u003eConfessions of an Italian\u003c\/i\u003e and Giacomo Sartori's \u003ci\u003eI Am God\u003c\/i\u003e. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Translation and the PEN\/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and, with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eElizabeth McKenzie\u003c\/b\u003e’s novel \u003ci\u003eThe Portable Veblen\u003c\/i\u003e was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for fiction. She is the author of the novel \u003ci\u003eMacGregor Tells The World\u003c\/i\u003e and story collection \u003ci\u003eStop That Girl\u003c\/i\u003e. Her work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBest American Nonrequired Reading\u003c\/i\u003e, and other publications. McKenzie is senior editor of the \u003ci\u003eChicago Quarterly Review\u003c\/i\u003e and the managing editor of \u003ci\u003eCatamaran Literary Reader\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304175096037,"sku":"NP9781681370781","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681370781.jpg?v=1767738761","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-communist-isbn-9781681370781","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}