100 books like Private Angelo

I encountered this book backward. As a teenager growing up at the end of the US war in Vietnam, I read the Mad magazine spoof of the movie version long before I saw the movie itself, and then I read the novel. I focused on the antiwar theme and the concern of the bomber crew to get home without getting shot down.

The novel was based on Heller’s wartime experience, but I hardly realized it was about bombing Italy until I discovered the papers one of his crewmates had donated to Cornell University. I learned how many of the episodes were based on real incidents, including the only time the novel focuses on Italian civilians—when the crew objects to destroying an Italian Alpine village of no military significance. 

I was surprised to learn that John Hersey won a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for a novel—in fact, his first. I had always thought of him as mainly a journalist for The New Yorker. One of my students recommended this. He was the grandson of the model for the main character, an Italian-American US Army major. My student was proud of his “nonnu,” the Allied military governor of a Sicilian village, for his efforts to help the starving villagers.

What they wanted more than food, though, was to replace the church bell that Mussolini had requisitioned to melt down and make into weapons. Spoiler alert: in the novel (and in real life), he succeeds—despite opposition from a superior officer, a thinly disguised General George S. Patton.

Living off and on in Italy for more than twenty years, I’ve been struck by Italians’ ambivalence toward Americans. On the one hand, they credit us with liberating them from Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. On the other hand, they blame us for the harm that the preferred US strategy—aerial bombardment—caused to civilians and the sometimes high-handed and racist policies of the Allied occupation.

I was fascinated to find this deep ambivalence captured so well in Hayes’s novel, ostensibly a love story of a lonely US soldier and a destitute Italian woman displaced to Rome by the bombing of her native Genoa. As someone who teaches about gender and war, I appreciated the author’s subtle treatment of the power imbalances between two characters representing the victorious and vanquished countries.

Like the Catch-22 character, Yossarian, Burns spent part of his time as a soldier censoring prisoner-of-war letters. His own prose was considered transgressive for its time. What struck me was not only his subject matter—who else wrote in 1944 about drunken, gay American GIs hanging out in seedy dives in occupied Naples?—but also his tone.

He pulled no punches in depicting the fraught relations and power differentials between occupiers and occupied, not to mention the resentment of the ordinary soldiers toward their superiors. Still, he captured the resilience of the Neapolitans with evocative depictions of street life, and I especially liked his ear for everyday speech—across a range of social classes among both the Americans and the Italians.

If you like intrigue, then welcome to Venice in 1938. This novel features a likable heroine in search of the solution to a mystery contained in a sketchbook. It’s full of art—both real and metaphorical. Set against the backdrop of impending war, this one is full of courage and heart.

Set in Italy during WWII, Liliana Nicoletti becomes involved in the partisan cause to save her country from the Germans. When her family encounters an escaped POW, she learns what it means to fight the Fascists who are destroying her community and joins the resistance.  

Her mother and sisters shot, mud and blood streaming over her face, she picks up the rifle she hadn’t used in years and vows to find her father. Realistic and horrific, the first half of the tale paints a picture of courage beyond what we imagine possible and of relationships formed from the tangled threads of love and need. After the war, angst mixes with hope as Liliana and James search for the men who slaughtered innocent people. Is justice or revenge driving her?

The author drew me into the story with vivid details and kept me on the edge of my seat with twists and turns. I cared… show more.

Among the greatest family memoirs of all time. Novelist, Natalia Ginzburg (née Levi) grew up in a big family in Turin between the wars. Her Jewish father was a famous and famously irascible scientist, her mother a charmer from the well-to-do bourgeoisie. The last of five, Natalia gives a sparkling picture of the loves, friendships and conflicts between her older brothers and sisters as Fascist Italy drifted toward war. Impossible not to laugh and cry, while at the same time getting a sense of the deeper forces driving Italian life.

The bravery and sacrifice of women in the Second World War is repeated in several European countries as families struggle to fight back and survive simultaneously. The novel spans over two decades as the author brings to life a young woman’s fight to survive and protect everything she loves. Although trapped in a turbulent time, the importance that rural Italian midwives during unimaginable circumstances is revealed in a touching and emotional manner. Under the Light of the Italian Moon shines a light on bravery, sacrifice, and humanity.

Calvino, like Perec, was an experimental novelist, interested in imposing games and rules on what he created. Here, he took the convention of the short story collection and used it to dramatise the arrival of the twentieth century into rural Italy—the machine age, but also the fascist age, and the consuming fires of the Second World War. The incremental tension that comes from time passing is a powerful reading experience.

The Day of Battle was Volume Two of Rick Atkinson’s acclaimed Liberation Trilogy. While all three volumes of this series are well worth reading, Atkinson was at his best in the second volume which deals with the much-neglected campaigns of Sicily and Italy. The doyen of British military history and a veteran of the Italian campaign, the late Sir Michael Howard wrote that The Day of Battle was ‘one of the truly outstanding records of the Second World War’. I think it is too.