The Gorge by Umberto Eco, 2005
The magic trick:
Making a coming-of-age story double as a stunning character study of a unique father figure
U is for Umberto.
Or possibly for unbelievably good story.
It’s a coming-of-age story for our narrator, as he reflects back on his youth in World War II Italy. And as such, it’s remarkable. He’s coming of age through literal life-and-death situations. Very Isaac Babel in that way.
But what truly sends this story into the greatness stratosphere is the character of Gragnola. In many ways, he is the means by which the narrator grows up. It’s his philosophy filling the narrator’s head (the section in which he rants about each of the Ten Commandments, point by point, as being fascist is a story unto itself) early in the story. And it’s his decisions at the end of the story that color the entire experience for our narrator as he assembles and reassembles his new understanding of the world.
But even separated from his role in what the story means for the narrator, Gragnola is a memorable tragic character – the kind of person one could build an entire novel around.
And that’s quite a trick on Eco’s part.
The selection:
I once asked him why he came to the Oratorio, since everyone said he was an atheist. He told me that it was the only place he could see people. And, besides, he was not an atheist but an anarchist. At that time I did not know what anarchists were, and he explained that they were people who wanted freedom, with no masters, no kings, no state, and no priests. “Above all, no state, not like those Communists in Russia, where the state even tells them when they have to use the crapper.”
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