Novel & Cerita Novel By Umberto Eco

Eugenio Montale's poetry overshadows fiction for a lot of people, but the novelists held their own. Italo Svevo's 'Zeno's Conscience' from the twenties is this weird, perfect thing—a self-deluding narrator trying to quit smoking via psychoanalysis, and it’s both hilarious and bleak in a way that feels incredibly modern. That book alone makes the century. Then you’ve got Cesare Pavese, whose 'The Moon and the Bonfires' has this quiet, rural melancholy that just sticks to your bones. I’d argue Alberto Moravia’s 'Contempt' deserves more attention than it gets; it’s a brutal dissection of a marriage falling apart against the backdrop of the film industry. It’s sharper than a lot of his more famous work.

Post-war, Elsa Morante’s 'History' is a monumental, devastating read about a woman and her son during WWII. It’s almost too much to bear, but it’s masterful. I sometimes think Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 'The Leopard' gets grouped with 19th century stuff because of its setting, but it was published in the fifties and captures the end of an era with such profound, beautiful regret. For something completely different, Dino Buzzati’s 'The Tartar Steppe' is this existential, Kafka-esque fable about waiting for a war that never comes. It’s a mood all its own.