In 1984 Innocenzo Monti died after a short illness. He and the writer Lalla Romano had been married since 1932 and had met in the late 1920s in her native Piedmont. Romano – a poet, painter and the author of 19 novels – wrote the story of their life together in her 1987 book Nei mari estremi, rendered as In Farthest Seas by the translator Brian Robert Moore.
The structure of the book – an auto-fictional memoir – is bifurcated. The opening, shorter, part deals with the first four years of the relationship, from the moment of their first encounter (he was ‘wearing hiking boots, we were in the mountains’), to their early sexual explorations. ‘Discomfort, effort, labour’ is luckily replaced by ‘bliss’ that was ‘beautiful, even a little exalting’.
The second part focuses on the last four months of Innocenzo’s life: the nurses, the doctors, his ‘surrendered’ body. Both parts are told in the same curiously detached style. Mini-vignettes beginning in media res (‘It was Silvia…’) have little regard for readers who might not know the names of Romano’s family members, university lovers or particulars of her other books (details for which Moore’s notes are an indispensable aid). The effect is less one of constructed intimacy – the bare-all explanations of a memoirist – than that of the reader being a quiet, not discouraged intrusion.
Romano’s prize-winning 1957 novel A Silence Shared (Tetto Murato) was published in an equally prize-winning translation by Moore two years ago. Prior to that, only one of her works had appeared in English (a now out-of-print edition of childhood remembrances, The Penumbra). A Silence Shared – a semi-autobiographical story of resistance fighters in wartime Italy – was undoubtedly a more obvious choice with which to spearhead the ‘Romano Revival’. Compared to that book’s anti-fascist politics and icily perfect depictions of strained relationships, In Farthest Seas feels understated and less overtly impressive, despite its emotional subject matter.
Still, it has a subtle beauty. Less a trauma memoir (comparisons with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking seem misplaced), this is a book about what it means to share an intellectual interior life with someone – to translate Joyce for each other, to read Tolstoy together, to render a loved one as a character in a book. Romano tells us that ‘in my books Innocenzo is a virile character’, both ‘rational’ and ‘fanciful’.
The pages include excerpts of her poetry – the implication being that the poems are written for her husband, both the romantic and the foreboding (‘cold your recumbent /face’, she quotes from a ‘youthful period’). It is in this depiction of a literary intimacy that blurs the boundary between fiction and biography that In Farthest Seas truly impresses.
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