For They Have Sown the Wind, Alessandro Perissinotto - Review
For They Have Sown the Wind, Alessandro Perissinotto, Translated from Italian by Cindy Stamphill, Edizioni Piemme Spa, 2011, translation: 2014, 203 pages, ISBN: 978-1480426542
A lawyer is going to visit a client in prison… Sounds like the start of a bad joke; only this is not a joke, although the situation is very bad. A man, a teacher, is in prison accused of killing his wife. He insists he is innocent, moreover his mind “has filled up with butterflies, or ants or with dust.” He is finding it almost impossible to write the diary of events that his court appointed lawyer has requested - to help him, the teacher, remember, and the avocat to understand. To help expedite this process, the counsellor asks the court to release a box of photographs the police found in the teacher’s house when they arrested him. These form a visual chronicle of Giacomo Musso and his wife, Shirin’s life. Two elements, the photos and accompanying diary entries create the structure on this powerful and engrossing meditation on love, and the ways in which modern conflicts and biases can impact on it.
Superficially a classic tale of doomed young romance across cultural borders, the first third of the book seems almost too idyllic. Giacomo and Shirin meet in Paris where he is bartending in a trendy café to supplement his salary as a contract employee at the Cité des Sciences where he arranges educational exhibitions for school children. She appears as part of a crowd of regulars that includes Sebastien, an aspiring stand-up comic and her boyfriend. Imperceptibly, at first, they begin falling in love. Shirin is Iranian, the daughter of wealthy exiles: Giacomo is an underemployed, over educated farmer’s son from Piemonte, in Northern Italy. The vast differences between them are irrelevant in Paris. Only when they move back to Giacomo’s home village of Molini, do the author’s darker purposes begin to emerge.
We, along with our young lovers, have been set up. Northern Italy, birthplace of the far right Lega Nord is home to some of the most vigorously racist, anti-immigration populations in all Italy. As the Molinese community begins to press its desire to have their children in their ‘specially created school’ taught not only the traditions and dialect of the region, but proper Christian ideals, Shirin’s hitherto anti-Muslim stance begins to shift towards sympathy for the Muslim women in the area and rage at the community for lumping her into a culture she had rejected. Reading these passages, I found myself wondering what the UK Ministry of Education and the braying idiots of the Daily Slime would have to say about such a ‘Trojan Horse’ type of school.
Italy today, with its long seacoast and proximity to Northern Africa is under siege. Weekly it seems the news is filled with yet another set of painful stories and photographs of desperate people risking everything to reach a European shore. Thus Italy, like Greece, with their vast, structural, economic problems are being inundated with floods of determined, destitute refugees that humanity decrees must be embraced and cared for. It’s an impossible situation. Add to this the high visibility of the incomers into introverted communities suspicious of any newcomers and you have multiple recipes for disaster. In For They Have Sown the Wind, Alessandro Perissinotto has elaborated one, but in such a powerful and poignant fashion that the end, when it comes, seems totally expected and appropriate.
It would be easy to hate the callous, ignorant villagers of these traditional mountain communities. The mayor of Badallo in particular is presented as such a hypocritical pig that it the reader is tempted to feel he ‘got what was coming to him.’ Several of the other supporting characters are presented in more nuanced fashion. Antonio, Giacomo’s boyhood friend, remains loyal, even as the village turns against their school-teacher, while the family of the old man who insists on remaining in his isolated mountainside home is caught in a bind that many with truculent aging parents will identify with.
One of the things which made this novel such a powerful read, is the author’s refusal to offer absolutes. None of the characters are all bad or all good. They are enmeshed in a web composed of modern society’s evils and temptations with few, if any, clear guideposts for right behaviour. I can, however, totally recommend Shirin to my women friends who have been demanding a female protagonist with agency, although they may not be happy with what she does with it.
A fixture on the North Italian literary scene, the author earned a degree in Semiotics, later publishing a Dictionary of Fairytales. He now teaches at the University of Turin and has published several acclaimed novels. For They Have Sown the Wind, in Italian, Semina il Vento, published in 2011 won the Premio Fenice Europa 2012. One other novel, Una piccola storia ignobile, was translated into English as Blood Sisters, in 2011
The translation by Cindy Stamphill is excellent. The language flows smoothly even as it presents the flavours of the local community. This is a demanding read. It asks us to set aside easy judgements about why people behave the way they do. I am happy I was able to read it. 5*****