Italian Alley

A TALE OF POOR LOVERS (369 pp.)--Vasco Pratolini--Viking ($3.50).

Publishers have begun to balance the flood of G.I. novels about wartime Italy by letting the Italians speak for themselves. The American veteran's picture of Italy (in such books as All Thy Conquests, The Gallery and The Wolf That Fed Us) stressed the loneliness and isolation of individual Italians and their G.I. counterparts. Pratolini's Tale of Poor Lovers, a novel of Italy after World War I and of the goings-on in Florence's impoverished Via del Corno, makes the converse point: that men's lives are intricately intermingled, for good or evil, with the lives of their neighbors.

To most of the workers, merchants, prostitutes and thieves who inhabited the tiny Via del Corno in 1925, Mussolini's recent power grab was of less interest than neighborhood scandal. But Carlino, the Fascist clerk, itched for the Second Wave that would bring revenge on his political enemies. And Maciste, the Communist blacksmith, glumly recognized the shattering defeat that Italian leftists had suffered. Fruit Peddler Ugo, his hotheaded disciple, broke with him over weakkneed party policy, but returned one night when he learned that the Second Wave was starting. They roared off on Maciste's motorcycle in a desperate attempt to warn their comrades, but the squadristi shot Maciste dead and wounded Ugo. He eluded them and made his way back to the Via del Corno, where he collapsed near the apartment door of the street's most curious personality, the Signora.

The aging, bedridden Signora had been shrewd enough to quit her life as a ruthless courtesan before she became the victim instead of the victimizer of men. Now her cook, spying from the window on what happened in the Via del Corno, kept her supplied with the essential information for her intrigues and extortions. In the end, deserted and foiled, the half-crazed Signora determined to punish the entire street; she bought up every house and ordered wholesale evictions. But her fury brought on a stroke that left her a speechless idiot, while the Fascists collected the rent on her houses and hunted down young Communists like Ugo to tighten their political stranglehold.

Vasco Pratolini's jigsaw picture of violence, perversion and young love is colored by a tired tenderness for people too much at the mercy of their own appetites and apathies to fight or even to visualize the blackshirt terror closing in. Some readers will not have the patience to keep track of the dozens of lightly sketched characters; others will gag on the implication that communism was the only answer to Mussolini. But A Tale of Poor Lovers is no U.S.-brand party-line novel. It is wise, involved and European--a swarming microcosm of social and psychological complexities in modern Italian life.

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