The Law     by Roger Vailland, Translated by Peter Wiles Original language: French Published by Hippocrene Books, Inc. Pub. Date: 1989 Format: Paperback ISBN: 0907871119 List Price: $14.95, £9.51 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.51 Buy online from Amazon.com for $14.95 Published by Collins Pub. Date: 1967 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback Not available for ordering Published by Eland Books Pub. Date: 1985 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £8.99 Not available for ordering

A marvellous French novel, a well-deserved Goncourt Prize choice, about Italy, that special Italy once glorious and now rather notorious that lies south of Rome, a territory rife with corruption, feudalism, bigotry and emigration.


Vailland had established himself as one of the French Communist party’s favourite novelists of the mid-1950s when he was forced to confront his demons with the collapse of the Stalin myth after Khruschev’s famous attack on the dictator in 1956. He retreated to Italy’s Deep South to lick his wounds and wrote this book which is a profound, disenchanted meditation on both the Southern ‘system’ of patronage and corruption and the general cycles of human hope and ambition.


There are many funny moments in Vailland’s picture of the malign intensity of a claustrophobic little Italian town. The story is given focus by bouts of a strange and revealing game called ‘The Law’ apparently widely played in the South. It seems to be one of those salty old European institutions that are half-social and half-political in intent, like Siena’s Palio tournament or London’s Gentlemen’s clubs.


What makes this book more interesting than a critique of contemporary social ills is that Vailland sees ‘underneath’ the town of ‘Porto Manacore’ — with its chief bandit, his friend the chief of police and the still-influential feudal seigneur — to the ancient Greek settlement of Uria that existed on the same site. In many ways the habits and traits of that time are still present more than 2000 years later. Here Vailland touches on something that makes Italy so resonant and rich a place; its continuity. It’s the continuity we touch when under a Mediterranean sun we dip bread in salt and olive oil and taste what Homer tasted and are for a moment outside our own civilisation dominated by transitoriness and novelty — speeding cars, instant snacks and this week’s superstars.


This seems to be a book written in a white passion of wry knowledge; knowledge of the social games and structures, the psychological patterns we all live inside as well as the moments we seek and find some escape from them. A very exceptional work.

‘Between 1904 and 1914, between his twentieth and his thirtieth years, he had travelled throughout Europe, during the university vacations, to complete his education, in accordance with his father’s wishes. One summer, returning from London and on his way to Valencia where he was to embark for Naples, he had stayed for a time in Portugal. He had asked himself a thousand questions about the decline of this nation whose empire had extended all the way round the globe. He had come to know writers who wrote for nobody; politicians who governed for the British; businessmen who wound up their businesses in Brazil and lived aimlessly, on small incomes, in provincial towns. He had thought it the worst of misfortunes to be born a Portuguese. In Lisbon, for the first time in his life, he had made the acquaintance of a people who had lost interest.

Today he reflected that it had been the turn of the Italians, the French and the English to lose interest. Interest had emigrated to the United States, Russia, China, India. He lived in a country which had lost interest, except superficially the provinces of the North; but it was only superficially — the Italians of the North, like the French, concealing their loss of interest with the noise of their cars and their scooters. The Italians and the French had begun to portugalize themselves after the Second World War. This is what he thought, without attaching very much interest to it.’ p74