you again

Of Marcello Veneziani

Like today seventy-five years ago Mussolini he was freed from imprisonment in Campo Imperatore. Today the first volume of a monumental work dedicated to the leader tries to free him from the damnatio memoriae Antonio Scurati which goes to the bookshop today, M. the son of the century (ed. Bompiani, 840 pages, 22 euro). It seems strange but in the river of books dedicated to fascism and the Duce there is not a biographical novel entirely focused on his figure. Mussolini appears there a thousand and a thousand times as an evil demiurge, as a menacing shadow or as an ogre in individual stories, even private ones. But a fictionalized biography about him, in multiple volumes, without an apologetic or denigrating tone, something of a narrative equivalent of the monumental historical biography of Renzo De Felice, it wasn't there yet. Curious to see it, especially given the author's premises/promises of equidistance and the confession of having been subjugated by the character, and perhaps fascinated. It also happened to De Felice, who also came from an anti-fascist culture, left. Furthermore, Scurati does not lack narrative talent and a free gaze.
I would like to object something to the title because Mussolini may have been the son of his century but above all he was its father because he generated events, followers, imitations, works and curses like few others. He was the father of fascism and stepfather of anti-fascism. Some even considered that Mussolini invented an eternal category, Urfascism (Umberto Eco). Son of a century but father of an eternity, nice paradox, Benito.
In truth, Scurati's fictional biography renounces too large and significant a part of Mussolini's life: the one that precedes the foundation of fascism, il 1919, that is, the life of an anarchist, as a revolutionary socialist, as leader of the most radical left, as a master, journalist and writer, exile and prisoner, and then director of Avanti and other effervescent magazines, until the foundation of the Popolo d'Italia. But also Mussolini fighting in the First World War. Scurati's Mussolini is already the founder of fascism, much of his life has already passed. Read More