Review: Vasco Pratolini’s ‘Family Chronicle’
‘Cronaca Familia’, translated by Martha King; also occasionally called ‘Two Brothers’
That is the last hour of happiness I remember. I’ll never again find the happiness of spirit that cheered that evening. One can become accustomed to persecution, executions, massacres … The heart of a man is a precise mechanism, complete with a few essential levers to withstand cold, hunger, injustice, cruelty, betrayal; but destiny can wound him like a child tears off a butterfly wing. His heart comes out of it with a tired beat: from then on perhaps the person will become better, perhaps stronger, and perhaps more decisive and aware in his work, but he will never again find that fullness of life and humour in his spirit that touched happiness. That evening was the 18th of December 1944.
In this autobiographical novella, author Vasco Pratolini recounts his relationship with his late brother, who is given the name Dante in honour of an uncle, from the day of their mother’s death until the day of Dante’s. With their mother gone and their father fighting in the great war, Vasco is brought up by his grandmother in the heart of Florence, while baby Dante is sent away to live with a family in the hills where, thanks to his infantile beauty, he soon wins the affection and patronage of a local majordomo.
Meeting for only fifteen minutes a week, the two brothers grow up in vastly different worlds: while Vasco subsists in a state of urban poverty, his brother grows up in a countryside Villa, among gentlemen. He gains privilege and education from this exchange, but loses his heritage — truths about his late mother are kept from him, and he is even stripped of his uncle’s name and given a new one, Ferruccio—Dante being considered too “common” by his new benefactors. In Florence, Vasco grows to resent “Ferruccio,” being told too often (and with too little regard for “the effect those words might have on” his young and impressionable mind) that his “mama was dead because of” Ferruccio.
Only as young adults do they find love for one another. Vasco is seeking to become a journalist in spite of his almost complete lack of formal education; Ferruccio, a talented table tennis player, is struggling to navigate the trials of school and the troubles of young love. But even as they grow closer, supporting each other through sicknesses, bereavements, lost jobs, and failed romances, melancholy blooms over Ferruccio. A mutual friend remarks to Vasco that he “seems like a fragile person, someone who has never had anyone close to him that he could trust.” Vasco agrees.
Fascist Italy, fortunately for no-one but the reader, makes for a poetic backdrop: at every turn, the brothers’ struggles are exacerbated by the havoc wrought on the city by the fascist regime. Even when the regime begins its inevitable crumble at the hands of the Resistance movement and the allied forces, Italy is on a long road to recovery. And while the brothers' story approaches its foretold doom, the real tragedy begins to take shape not as a mere matter of corporeal life or death, but of spiritual salvation— just as the triumph of freedom over fascism is a matter of spiritual importance for the nation. The more fragile Ferruccio’s spirit becomes, the more desperately Vasco fights to provide him with the security of love and sureness of self-certainty which have been missing through his cold and estranged life of privilege.
Family Chronicle is short, a novella without waste. In this way, among others, it will appeal to fans of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; although the love between Pratolini’s men is fraternal, not sexual or romantic, in both books does the intensity of their love shine through all the more powerfully for the novels’ brevity. Family Chronicle is unflowery and unpretentious, with only the author’s apologetic admissions to interrupt the frankness of the narrative. Rarely has any book, autobiographical or otherwise, matched this one in its intimacy.
By telling the story between the first and second grammatical persons, Pratolini chose the perfect form with which to capture what he outlines as the aim of the book: “It is the author’s conversation with his dead brother. In writing it the author was looking for consolation, nothing more.” In doing so, Pratolini always keeps his reader at an uncanny distance: the use of first person matches the honesty of the novel in bringing us closer to its heart, but the much rarer and more unusual second person pushes us away again, as if we are intruding upon this story addressed to a dead man, rather than observing it neutrally as an invited guest (this being the usual practise for prose fiction). Perhaps this is all the more the case since the author neglects to ever mention whether he felt the novella succeeded in bringing him the solace he sought from it — as though, even after writing and publishing such an earnest and personal account, Pratolini could not bear but to keep barriers up to his reader, to keep himself safely at a distance from us.
