Only 120 pages long, Memorial, first published in 1983, is a small book about a small life. Yet the reader who opens it will discover a story that is unforgettable and moving in its sympathy, infused with the desire to give voice to the deepest human needs.
Written by Ferdinando Camon (b. 1935), one of the most notable of Italy’s post-World War II writers, this autobiographical novel is steeped in the peasant culture of Camon’s native Veneto, an ageless and but vanished way of life the author left behind for the city and the 20th century.
Relating the death of his mother and the building of an altar in her memory by his father, the story mixes memory and meditation to evoke his people’s spare, brutal lives with profound intimacy. “She knew nothing outside her house and those places where she worked,” writes the narrator of his subject, “but those places she knew by heart.” As he describes that house and her labors to nourish her family, Camon constructs an altar of words that seems to mirror his father’s altar of copper and wood, both constructions bearing witness to a simple life tethered to the land, a rugged love for loved ones, and to how much such a heart can hold.
