Deviation
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A devoted fascist changes her mind and her life after witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust
First published in Italy in 1979, Luce D’Eramo’s Deviation is a seminal work in Holocaust literature. It is a book that not only confronts evil head-on but expands that confrontation into a complex and intricately structured work of fiction, which has claims to standing among the greatest Italian novels of the twentieth century.
Lucia is a young Italian girl from a bourgeois fascist family. In the early 1940s, when she first hears about the atrocities being perpetrated in the Nazi concentration camps, she is doubtful and confused, unable to reconcile such stories with the ideology in which she’s been raised. Wanting to disprove these “slanders” on Hitler’s Reich, she decides to see for herself, running away from home and heading for Germany, where she intends to volunteer as camp labor. The journey is a harrowing, surreal descent into hell, which finds Lucia confronting the stark and brutal realities of life under Nazi rule, a life in which continual violence and fear are simply the norm. Soon it becomes clear that she must get away, but how can she possibly go back to her old life knowing what she now knows? Besides, getting out may not be as simple as getting in.
Finally available in English translation, Deviation is at once a personal testament, a work of the imagination, an investigation into the limits of memory, a warning to future generations, and a visceral scream at the horrors of the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This powerful and provocative novel from D'Eramo (Nucleo Zero), published in Italy in 1979, recounts the WWII experiences of the 18-year-old daughter of Italian fascists, based on D'Eramo's own past. Lucia leaves home in February 1944 to volunteer at a German chemical plant. She is arrested for participating in a strike, then repatriated to Italy, but rather than rejoin her parents, she turns herself over to a Nazi patrol, not really believing the things that are being said about the atrocities the Nazis are committing, as they don't mesh with her upbringing. Imprisoned at Dachau, she is disabused of that notion. She eventually escapes during an air raid while cleaning sewers in Munich as part of a forced labor crew. By war's end, she has made her way to Mainz, where a bombed-out wall collapses, leaving her paralyzed. In December 1945, she returns to Italy in a wheelchair but "non doma" (not crushed), and goes on to become a mother, academic, and writer. Readers see Lucia calming terminal patients, staring down a police dog, shedding identities like snake skins, all while formerly repressed memories of the war keep bubbling up in her narration. D'Eramo vividly conveys the cruelty and wretchedness of war. An excellent translator's note from Appel clarifies the sometimes confusing chronology of events and the mix of memoir and fiction in this audacious novel.
