Benjamino Petrosino: The Passage of the Frog and the Wild Strawberries of 1942

Reviewed by SUSAN JACOBS

Books in English by Italians who have settled in New Zealand are exceptionally rare. One writer was Renato Amato, whose sudden death in 1965 cut short a promising talent. His acclaimed short stories collected in The Full Circle of the Travelling Cuckoo reveal him uneasily between two worlds, that of his native Italy and his adopted country.

The dense and intriguing title is a surface similarity he shares with Beniamino Petrosino's book. However, Petrosino, who settled in Christchurch in 1983, has written a novel that is firmly rooted in Italy, an account of a boy growing up in an impoverished peasant community in the southern region of Basilicata.

This was the area discovered by Carlo Levi in his classic Christ Stopped at Eboli, written after he was exiled there for his anti-fascist views in the 1930s. According to Levi, Christ, a symbol of western historical progress, had bypassed these forgotten areas. But, scoffs Petrosino's down-to-earth narrator: "How could Jesus not have come here where each village counts at least one church? This is God's country and the signs of love for God and his saints are everywhere." Unable to afford their daily meal, people gave jewellery to the church in the vain hope their lives would change. While Levi's evocative work is that of an outsider, this narrator writes from first-hand experience and he does not spare us its brutality.

He portrays a primitive, superstitious world that traces the effects of ignorance and poverty on the numerous descendants of the murderous Count. His curse is considered responsible for all the family's troubles, although the age-old exploitation and neglect of the south by an indifferent state cops the real blame.

It is not all grim reading though. There are humorous, often lyrical descriptions of village feasts, frog-hunting expeditions, spells to ward off demons and rituals to clean up lice-ridden children.

The characters are fully and unsentimentally drawn — from the shockingly violent father, Pasquale, to the long-suffering mother, Maria. After she barely survived one savage beating, local police advised her to cut her husband's throat while he was sleeping, assuring her they would not prosecute.

The ending is a little unsatisfactory in its abrupt attempt to stitch up the thread of thwarted lives alluded to in the beginning. It does not really explore the dilemma of grappling with a past that, no matter how hard you try to escape, carries deep emotional scars. This legacy can be both destructive and beguiling, a bit like the south itself. Despite this unevenness, a compelling read.

Publisher: Hazard Press

Price: $24.95