Just after the second world war, while other Italian novelists were focusing ‘neo-realistically’ on recent events, Flaiano decided to cast his gaze further back to another war. This was the Abyssinian War of 1936 in which the Fascist Regime planned to assert Italy’s destiny as a colonial power. Flaiano produces a picture that is very far from the high-sounding rhetoric of conquest. The book’s protagonist accidentally wounds an innocent native woman in the forest — the same woman who gave herself unfeigningly to him in a night of love — and he has to kill her, thereby soiling himself with an act of the most shameful violence. From here on he falls into an appalling spiral of evil, a terrible chain of events afflict him, beginning with an illness that he has perhaps picked up in that fleeting relationship and that seems like the woman’s implacable vendetta against him. Africa becomes a realm of contagion for this anti-hero who is the incarnation of the ordinary man caught up in a pitiless adventure which, at heart, he has no conscience for.


The book won the first Strega Prize in 1947 and Flaiano went on to collaborate on the films of Fellini and Pasolini.

‘It was not a good film and yet I had seen it several times. Every day, although I was beginning to be ashamed of this weakness, I left, I left the hotel determined to have a stroll; I went as far as the gardens, looked at the valley, went into a bar to drink an apéritif and then, insensibly, there I was in front of the stills of that film I had already seen so often, in Italy too. I was afraid the cashier would recognise me that day and be amazed at such stubborn constancy, but she did not recognise me and a little later I was deep in the muffled narcotic calm of the dream.

I knew why the film made me so calm. There was something in the eyes of a supporting actress — oh, nothing special! — something which reminded me of other eyes. An overpowering peace comforted me when those eyes rolled on the screen; I gave myself up to them and tried to live with her memory, to retrace in my most forgotten memories the moments of our happiness. And I was ashamed of it.’ pp68-69