Alain Elkann
UNA GIORNATA
Milano: Bompiani, 2020. ISBN 978-88-301-0391-7
Reviewed by K.E. Bättig von Wittelsbach1
In 1985, around the time Alain Elkann published his international bestseller and winner of the Premio Polifemo, Alberto Moravia wrote: "The felicity of [Elkann's work] derives from a memory that comes and goes like the ebb and flow of the sea, uncovering from time to time the bottom of reality as if by chance." In Elkann's latest novel, Una giornata, not yet translated into English, the bottom of reality is not only uncovered in one single day of sixty-eight-year-old Edmond Bovet-Maurice's life, but it falls out entirely as our protagonist finds himself suddenly adrift and robbed of the certainties that have supported and defined his long life of haut bourgeois accomplishment. If the idea of one's mortality, and consequently one's legacy, has been in the focus of much of Elkann's recent writing (his recent novels Il fascista and Anita come to mind), the themes of the complexity of family past, told and untold, and the fragility of both our bodies and our worldly reputation have never been far from Elkann's mind, either in his 1985 novel Piazza Carignano or the 1999 Il Padre francese. The same can be said of many of his short stories and non-fiction works, such as Nonna Carla, composed at the time his mother, Carla Ovazza from a well-known Piedmontese family of bankers, was dying in a Turin hospital.
Una giornata opens on a splendid May morning when the sole preoccupation of Edmond Bovet- Maurice, the suave, self-assured protagonist, director of an important Paris museum (and one whose sensitivity and elegance quickly bring to mind Charles Swann), seems to be the realization that during the previous winter he might have put on some weight. But very quickly, there softly emerges from the background Edmond's regret, and feelings of wounded pride, about his wife Odile discovering, several months earlier, his infidelity and then leaving him for another man. Edmond's feelings of irritation are soon compounded by a discovery of an odd mole that makes him consult his doctor. Yet the doctor, an old family friend, instead of entirely dispelling Edmond's fears, recommends that Edmond seek a second opinion from a specialist. Edmond's encounters with his sister Louise and his new (and much younger) girlfriend Saskia do little to reestablish his self-assurance. Instead, they bring forth the questions of both the complexity of family relationships and mortality. As devoted to Edmond as she claims to be, Saskia is candid about not wanting to become encumbered, in the future, by caring for an aged man: quite an awakening and turning of tables for Edmond, who until this day "Sapeva benissimo di essere un uomo che può piacere a donne di varie età [...] Era invidiato, non solo per il suo successo professionale, ma anche perché godeva fama di donnaiolo impenitente..." (pp. 7-8).
Edmond's quiet but insistent angst is exacerbated by his keen awareness of being only two years away from mandatory retirement from his position as director of one of the most prominent Paris museums, an institution to which he has been, with great success, devoted for many decades, and which has made this "esteta" and recipient of the Légion d'honneur a powerful man in "un certo ambiente" (p. 9). The preoccupation with finding a suitable position that would allow him to continue to maintain his place in society is a slight but persistent murmur in the background of each one of Edmond's encounters during this long day, as are the allusions that almost all of his interlocutors make to his possible upcoming election to the Académie française. But when Edmond is told of a phone call inviting him to a meeting with the Private Secretary of the Académie, his feelings are both an eager curiosity and a sense of vague unease. He has long been hoping to be accepted as a member, and thus, to keep his place in the society that has long been a stage for his success. And it is not by chance that Edmond's ambition is to step into the ranks of nothing less but les immortels, as the forty members of the Académie are known in France. Yet, the meeting with the Secretary administers the decisive blow in this day marked by the mounting angst: Edmond's candidacy needs to be postponed because of serious objections by two academicians. At least one of these objections, Edmond is told, is related to the supposed collaborationist past of Edmond's mother and grandmother during the Second World War. Edmond's shock is made worse when a male friend, and later another academician whom he encounters at an evening party, make revelations that capsize much of what he knows of his family origins. Not only is it highly likely that his grandmother was Jewish, but this is complicated by the fact that both she and her daughter, Edmond's mother, maintained contacts with top Nazi officers in occupied Paris, and even Hermann Goering. If Edmond's success in his profession and society has been stellar, it now appears that most of his rapid ascent happened thanks to his grandmother's and mother's skillful navigation of their high contacts in the atmosphere of the highly ambivalent French World War II political legacy and the strategic realignment of political loyalties in post-war France. This is made worse when, at the precise moment when he seeks comfort in familiar circles, at the soirée given by a woman he used to love in his youth, he is made aware, again by an academician, of allegations of plagiarism detected in one of his works on seventeenth-century painting. The sensation of having the carpet pulled out from under his very existence becomes complete at Hôtel Crillon, where Edmond has too much to drink in the company of an old acquaintance who is facing a terminal illness. At the end of the evening, Edmond, determined to return home on foot, is exhausted and oblivious to the dangers of early-morning traffic. He collapses on the ground at the Avenue de l'Opéra, struck down by a car just as the first rays of light mark the arrival of a new day.
In Elkann's vast opus, Una giornata stands out for its brilliant economy of style and its cinematic qualities. A reader familiar with the French cinema of the 1970s will easily imagine Michel Piccoli playing the role of the increasingly anxious and disoriented protagonist, traversing the streets of central Paris, cut off from all the certainty that has defined his life, as the dawn approaches. It has long become fashionable to say, when speaking of many modern-day novels, that the city is a protagonist rather than a setting, but this is certainly true for Una giornata. Here, Paris is alive in the most tangible way possible; aside from the name of the museum that the protagonist directs and which is never revealed, everything in this novel has its anchor in the best-known streets of Paris, its hotels, tea rooms, night-clubs and neighborhoods, its politicians and artists, its memory, literary and historical. In their concreteness, the names define the character of both the protagonist's moods and the conversations he has throughout this long day. Historical figures (Edmond, son of a Socialist father, was always close to Mitterrand), designers (Chanel), writers and texts from the modern French canon (Proust and Duras, but also Drieu La Rochelle and Céline) help to flesh out the world of a protagonist who is "prudente, riservato" (p. 70), belonging neither to the Right nor the Left, but always careful to find himself "[...] dalla parte di chi aveva il potere, con moderazione, in modo silenzioso." (p. 89). Defined by his almost courtly detachment, which continues to be a guarantee of his professional triumphs, his successes in society and in matters of love, Edmond will by the end of the novel lose his bearings in every way imaginable. His attempts to flee the sources of discomfort that he encounters throughout the day only lead him back in a crescendo that grows louder with each new encounter. Finding himself erased by a "cancel culture" ante litteram, the invisible but tight web of stories spun in the same society that had for many years kept wide open the doors to his success, at the end of the novel, amidst the feverish vortex of internal monologue, he literally loses his balance, and his life.
While mortality and the weight of the past are also central to Elkann's Anita, the novel that immediately preceded Una giornata (and which is available in English), here these central issues are intertwined with the political. "[...] chi non faceva il doppio gioco durante l'occupazione?" Edmond asks the Secretary of the Académie française after being told that his family's ties to both the occupiers and the resistance represent an obstacle to his becoming a member. An acquaintance of Eliane Maurice from wartime Paris who cannot forgive her marrying a Socialist after the war and "erasing" her earlier wartime affiliations (also by cultivating a strong interest in Judaism), is now poised to avenge himself and vote against Edmond's candidacy. But things become more complicated. There is also, as Edmond finds out from the Secretary, the delicate question of wartime information trading between the collaborationists and the French resistance. In the case of Edmond's parents, who met during the war but were on opposite sides, one instance of such trading of information will result in the tragedy of a great number of Jewish children hidden in French monasteries being discovered by the Nazis and taken to their deaths. The ambiguity of personal legacy, thus, here becomes the ambiguity of the legacy of an entire generation, an entire society. Rather than having his questions answered, our protagonist sees them multiply: Who was, really, his grandmother? Why did she change her last name to a less Jewish-sounding one? Why did she frequent Nazi circles in the Ritz? Who was his grandmother's Swiss lover with Nazi sympathies? What kind of society was Paris under occupation, with members of the resistance and Nazi sympathizers living side by side, meeting and even trading information? Edmond's ambiguity about his professional future, his sentimental attachments and family relationships (we find out, en passant, that he has a son and a daughter who he rarely sees), now turns, in an almost thriller-like fashion, into the search inside the ambiguity of his roots and of reality itself.
The essential melancholy that the Italian critic Elena Loewenthal perceptively identified as a constant note in Alain Elkann's writing grows in Una giornata into a place where much of the firm ground is lost, not only for the protagonist but perhaps also for an entire generation. For this reason, too, this brief novel is remarkable, a gem of an addition to the canon of modern Jewish Italian literature, and one which we hope will soon find its way, in translation, to English-speaking audiences.
1 K.E. Bättig von Wittelsbach teaches in the Department of Romance Studies and the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She also directs Cornell’s Luigi Einaudi Program in Government at the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin, Italy.