The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba

Two thousand Italian partisans took the city of Alba on October 10, 1944, and two hundred lost it to the Fascists on November 2. Among the bedraggled fighters in this historic siege was Beppe Fenoglio. He later made his debut as a writer with this collection of short stories based on his experiences in the Italian resistance movement.The year 2002 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the collection’s original publication in Italy and its first appearance in English. Fenoglio’s spare, direct prose still strikes with the staccato-like force of rifle fire. He creates an intimate, unvarnished portrait of his fellow partisans: an ill-equipped, malnourished mix of trained soldiers, eager farmboys, and broken old men. Antiheroes, they all but bumbled their way into playing a crucial role in the Allied victory of World War II, then returned home to nurse their wounds.Fenoglio’s cast includes the drunken thief Blister, who opens fire inside a house for a glass of grappa; Hector, a partisan commander who becomes an unemployed mama’s boy following the war; and Raul, an intellectual like Fenoglio, who joins the partisans out of ideological commitment, only to find scant room on the battlefield for ideology.