“The Sea Where Myths Are Born”, the review

The first journey that forms part of "Il mare da dove nascono i miti" consists of a collection of reports written between April and May 1948 in Calabria, commissioned by Il Tempo. Giuseppe Berto, a restless writer from Veneto and one of the most astute observers of contemporary Italian life, appears here with a tone and style very different from those that usually characterise him – namely, those of a neurotic intellectual who is more apocalyptic than integrated. Here his writing becomes more fluid, almost gentle; the reportage unfolds as a collection of even the most minor accounts of daily life in southern Italy, which was a complete revelation to him. This is merely his first foray into a world that is only seemingly distant from him, but which will in fact become entirely familiar to him, to the point of serving as a fundamental balm for his own neurosis. Berto will, in fact, take up residence in Capo Vaticano, in the rugged and isolated Calabria, worn out by Rome and its cliques. Exhausted, perhaps even more by himself than by Moravia and his circle, by a stubbornly suppressed anger and a constant malaise that always brings him back to square one, forcing him continually to swim against the tide, he finds in the sea, from which myths are born, the light step and keen gaze of one who has cast off all unnecessary baggage.

Edited by Saverio Vita, the book forms part of the complete works currently being republished by Settecolori. The following three decades—the remainder of his life—are punctuated by repeated journeys to the South, his new home and, as such, a place to be discovered year after year. This collection should be read alongside his other works: he was thirty-five when he first arrived in Calabria and had recently published Il cielo è rosso; he was forty-nine in 1963 when the success of Il male oscuro swept him away. He writes: “For the past five years, I have spent a few months in Calabria every year. I go to a beautiful place to be at peace, if possible, and not to study the reality of Southern Italy, which now matters to me no more than it might matter to any ordinary citizen concerned with literary and psychological issues rather than social and political ones.” Giuseppe Berto is increasingly detached from the narrow social chronicle of his time, yet some of his reflections today appear to coincide with those of Pier Paolo Pasolini, which, although expressed with an almost opposite ambition, betray the same underlying nature. The uncontrollable contemporary confusion – now beyond control – leaves only the literary imagination as a possibility in the face of an increasingly unresolved and incapable political present. Berto does not seek prophecies, but a refuge within which to continue observing the world, the centre of which is, for him, nothing but a perpetual deception. 

  

Giuseppe Berto
, "Il mare da dove nascono i miti
", Edizioni Settecolori, 350 pp., 24 euros