Beppe Fenoglio

A Private Affair Beppe Fenoglio

A powerful World War II novel about a young soldier joining the anti-German resistance in occupied Italy, this classic, which touches on everything from wartime dangers and adventures to desperate love, is regarded as one of the greatest works of twentieth-century Italian literature.

Beppe Fenoglio's A Private Affair is one of the great books of the Second World War and a masterpiece of modern Italian literature. Milton is the nom de guerre of the book's protagonist, a one-time student of English literature who, in the chaotic last years of the war, has joined a partisan band. Before the war, gangly Milton was in love with the beautiful FulviaFulvia let him read poetry to herand now he hears that a friend and fellow-partisan, handsome Giorgio, was sleeping with her at the time. Jealous and furious, Milton hastens to confront Giorgio, only to discover that he has been captured by the Germans. A Private Affair tells the store with Milton's mad questpursued through mud and fog and rain and terror, while barely evading German and Fascist patrolsto rescue his friend and settle a personal grudge from a lost world of peace.  Italo Calvino praised the book for the "geometric tension" between its themes of love and war and for its unsettling and utterly persuasive mingling of absurdity and mystery. The British novelist Paul Bailey has called the novel's closing pages "superb and superbly exciting." A Private Affair is a peerless story of the violent heart and world.