Spring 1918, a few months after Caporetto. Sergeant Julien Vertou observes the snow still covering Mount Grappa. Where the last line of Italian defense moved after the defeat, the Alpine troops of the Susa battalion have set up their camp. But Julien is not one of them: for the last sixteen years, the Foreign Legion has been his refuge and his penance. What happened before no longer matters. Lost are his dreams, and lost is the love that for a brief season made him believe he could invent the future. The war he experienced in Africa had only one rule: kill so as not to be killed.
But the boys he now shares the trenches with don't have this certainty, many barely know how to hold a rifle. They come from mountains where they hope to return soon, perhaps to a girlfriend who is waiting for them. Like Gildo and Valdo, who together are not thirty-six, or Domenico, who is twenty-two and has been fighting and surviving for three. Their frightened looks begin to chip away at Julien's armor. He has no one waiting for him, no place he can call home. And yet, no matter how much he insists on denying it, the past he left behind slowly takes center stage again. A familiar dialect, the name of a stream, that of a mountain village. Julien has always thought that his fate was sealed, that there was no room for happiness, a woman, normality. And yet, on the Grappa, while the war rages, among soldiers exhausted by fear and cold, Julien feels that a new beginning is possible for him too.
The narrative debut of historian Gianni Oliva, Il pendio dei noci (Mondadori, 2024, Euro19.00, pp. 252. Also available as an ebook) is a choral novel in which the story of the last, frantic months of the First World War is mixed with an intense and painful private story.
We asked Gianni Oliva to introduce us to his first novel.
"They are two stories that intertwine. In the odd chapters, set in the late nineteenth century, there are the events of an orphan, Giuliano, taken in by the parish priest of Coazze, a village in the Piedmont Alps: the seminary, the lack of vocation, the adolescent love for Maddalena, the conflicts that force him to flee to France, then enlist in the Foreign Legion and fight for twenty years in Morocco."
What about even chapters?
«The even-numbered chapters are set in 1918 on Monte Grappa, with a group of Alpine soldiers from the same town joined by a French unit with a legionnaire who acts as interpreter, Sergeant Julien».
Are Giuliano and Sergeant Julien the same person?
«Yes: and from the meeting with the Alpine troops the plot develops, the accounts with the past, the protagonist's rediscovery of himself».
Why, after so many historical essays, fiction?
"For the pleasure of writing from emotions, rather than from research and rationality. But also for the belief that literature can bring you closer to history better than essays. It is difficult to imagine a young person reading a history of the Resistance, if not for university exam deadlines: but The Path to the Nest of Spiders by Calvino, or Spring of Beauty by Fenoglio, perhaps, yes."
A novel that is also a way to raise awareness of the Great War?
«Also. But to make it known from the point of view of the men who fought it, of the boys of '99 who grew up in the Catholic traditions of the peasant world and were projected into the fury of the trenches. What did it mean to address the theme of death? Of death suffered, but also of death inflicted?».
In the novel, an older soldier teaches a recruit to aim against the wave of attackers, but to shoot with his eyes closed: "You must not see that you have killed, otherwise you will not sleep anymore. Let the war take the blame," he says...
"I imagined many dialogues in the trenches, men thrown from normality to hell who try to save their bodies but also their consciences. Valdo, the weak one overwhelmed by fear, Domenico, the more solid one who learns the tricks of survival, Captain Maglioli, an interventionist who feels the difference between the declamations of the square and the reality of the conflict; and then Gildo, Barba, those who resist in the hope of returning home. The trench is the kaleidoscope of a suffering but true humanity."
And the women?
"There are female figures in the novel. There is a mountain woman, Maddalena, beautiful, rebellious, genuine and innocent in her desire to discover the hidden world beyond her valley; there is Doriana, a journalist from the beginning of the century, nonconformist, with a taste for surprising; there is Ada, daughter of the peasant culture in which she was born. And, obviously, there are loves, because in love emotions explode and in comparison we grow, together or by contrast."
And then there is the protagonist, Giuliano-Julien…
«Yes, the most tormented and intense figure: a man full of energy, with the dreams he has lost, but also the memories that resurface and slowly chip away at the legionnaire's armor».