Written to Be Understood

There is a kind of writer who drops out of literary history not because he was bad but because he was popular. Francesco Mastriani is one of them. Across a career of more than forty years he published over a hundred novels, and by the middle of the nineteenth century he was among the most widely read authors in southern Italy. His readers were not the salon elite. Benedetto Croce wrote that all Naples read him except the literary people, and his steady public was the city’s clerks, small tradesmen and professional families. He wrote for them on purpose. His more literary contemporaries sometimes condescended to that choice. He did not condescend back.

You can feel the decision in the prose. Mastriani distrusted the ornate, unspooling sentence of the florid tradition and wrote something closer to educated Neapolitan speech: direct, concrete, occasionally abrupt. The sentence that needs four words does not, in Mastriani, get six. It is the writing of a man who needs to be understood, and it is a good deal harder to carry into English than florid writing is, because the temptation with a plain style is always to round off its edges, to supply the subordinate clause the author declined to write. Plain prose gives a translator nowhere to hide.

The novel belongs to a European craze. In 1842 Eugène Sue began serialising Les Mystères de Paris, a descent into the criminal underworld of the French capital that became a sensation and bred imitators across the continent: mysteries of London, of Berlin. The form was never only entertainment. It was a way of making the hidden anatomy of the modern city visible on the page. When Mastriani turned it on Naples in 1869 he knew exactly how his city differed from the others. Naples had not industrialised. Its poor were not yet a proletariat but an older class of the excluded, and its camorra was a pre-industrial fraternity woven into the prison, the market and the police alike. The city had lately been handed a new government, the unified Italy of 1861, and its poorer inhabitants had found it, in its cruelty, almost indistinguishable from the old one.

That is the bitterness running under the book. Mastriani set the story in 1846 and published it in 1869 and 1870, after he had watched Bourbon rule give way to revolution and then to national unification without the material conditions of his city changing in any way he could recognise. He understood poverty as a system rather than a personal failing. His villains are mostly its products; his heroes are mostly defined by their capacity to endure it without turning bitter themselves. At the centre stands Marta, a young woman of undramatic, unsentimental goodness who does not preach and does not explain herself, and who simply remains, a fixed point in a world of betrayal.

Around her the book is crowded: a thief whose childhood destitution is a case study in how poverty manufactures crime, a strangler who moves through it like a force of nature, a peasant family broken methodically by a corrupt judge. Mastriani gave these people a private vocabulary too, the camorra cant he set down with care. We have kept those words in Italian, with their meanings in the glossary, because to translate them away would dissolve the record he was preserving.

He died in Naples in 1891. His great novel is in three parts, and Marta, or Faith is the first of them. It is one of the great unread novels of nineteenth-century Europe. Our English edition of the first volume is out now: espressopublishing.com/title-imn.html

If you would like a letter when the next volume is ready, our reader list is at espressopublishing.com/readers.

Idara Crespi
Publisher, Espresso Publishing House