Resigning Women

BEEN HERE A THOUSAND YEARS

By Mariolina Venezia

Translated from the Italian by Marina Harss

Farrar Straus Giroux. 263 pp. $24

Although the title of this novel says "been here a thousand years," the ancestors of these characters have lived in Italy far longer than that, dwelling almost since the beginning of time in the instep of the Italian boot. But this particular tale begins on March 27, 1861, the day Rome was designated the official capital of modern Italy. Novelist Mariolina Venezia presents her country's history through several generations of bumptious peasants who change, over the decades, from somnolent, archetypal figures at one with their livestock and landscape to self-conscious, contemporary human beings ridden with knowledge and anxiety.

In 1861, their world -- "the town of Grottele, which is in the part of Basilicata that lies about one hundred kilometers from the Puglia coastline" -- is still ruled, or remembered, through wonder. When Concetta, the mistress of Don Francesco Falcone, the town's biggest landowner, gives birth to a son (after a string of unwanted girls), she screams so loudly that she breaks all the jars of olive oil stored in their basement. The rest of the town is starving, as usual, so they rejoice in this yellow flood, lapping it from cobblestones and cherishing the memory forever.

Alas, the much-longed-for son turns out to be a detestable little jerk, but by then we are well-launched into the chronicle of this family, which includes all those wacky young females, who are always doing something like running off with the parish priest and stealing the family fortune. The daughter to remember here is Albina, who eventually gives birth to Candida, who will marry and have another flock of kids, including Alba, a prim-faced pain in the neck who is fond of eating one grape and calling it a meal, who can't stand to be touched, hates dirt and will be the first female in the family to go away to school, where she will meet a petty teenage tyrant, self-appointed queen, who will, in turn, inspire a namesake in Alba's daughter, Gioia.

I'm afraid I'm not doing justice to this charming little book, but whether the reader will enjoy it depends on his or her ability to decipher all the gnarled branches of a very involved family tree. (And the family tree provided in the front only contributes to the confusion, since it purports to be handwritten, with cryptic asides: "The underlined name is yours. And me, well, I'm not there yet.") But if you can let go of any need to know who everyone is and whom they're related to, the story just lollops along, and when you get to Rocco, for instance, the son of Lucrezia, all you really have to know is that he's important to the novel and that you need to keep track of him.

Meanwhile, the novel tells the history of modern Italy. These peasants, Venezia claims, are perhaps the descendants of Cro-Magnon man: Humans were living in limestone caves in these parts long before anyone thought of keeping records. After them came "the dispossessed of all races: Albanian refugees, Greek monks, heretics, Jews fleeing oppression. . . . They had one thing in common: hunger." Then comes the massacre of outlaw bandits from 1861 to '63, and in 1915 Italy enters World War I. Then Fascists rise, along with communists. Rocco (remember him?), after some years in a seminary, becomes first a Fascist and then, for a time, a communist, thus summing up the three main strains of Italian thought.

Then comes World War II and after that, 1950s land reform. By this time, Rocco has married Alba (she of the one-grape breakfast), and they have one daughter, whom Alba names after the schoolgirl tyrant from long ago -- Gioia. It is this Gioia, it turns out, whom the story is really about. She leaves home and experiences many adventures and misadventures, which are meant to demonstrate, I suppose, how the superstition and custom that have kept the rural population in one place for so many years have lost power. At last, these people can move into the contemporary world.

I guess you'd have to say this book isn't for everyone. You need to be interested in the past and interested in Italy -- far beyond the compulsory three-week vacation in Tuscany. This isn't a book about surface charm or old-world villas. This is about how families remember what happened to them, about who did what to whom, about how our idiosyncrasies often grow to mask whomever we may be as actual human beings. (Alba is remembered for not eating and then for becoming a world-class clean-freak: She's always seen in the background scrubbing a floor or polishing silver; she hates dirt so much she pours cement over her garden.) Gioia, the one who does the remembering here, is portrayed with every possible tender nuance. In an afterword, the author thanks her father for his research and mentions the town of Grottole by name. We are meant to take this novel as actual history -- in bewitching disguise.

See can be reached at http://www.carolynsee.com.