The Day Before Happiness

Ugh, this is an exquisite little book. It would make a great companion-piece to Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, with which it shares both theme and setting – namely, a childhood in Naples in the 1950s. Beyond that, though, the two are polar opposites. Ferrante is writing about girls, De Luca a boy; she is setting up a multi-volume epic, he knocks this one off in just over a hundred pages; and while Ferrante's characters are growing up in one of the interwar housing projects on the edge of the city, De Luca's protagonist is deep in the labyrinthine heart of the old town.

Naples in this book is ancient, freighted with past lives and secrets – the dusty buildings around the courtyard where our narrator spent his childhood were, he show more says, ‘full of walled-up trapdoors, secret passageways, crimes and passions. They were swarming with ghosts.’ The city's ramshackle geography, like the worldview of its inhabitants, is seen as something that has grown out of a specific historical context – especially the Second World War, long stories about which the boy hears from his guardian. These make up some of the best scenes in the book, although there is always a feeling, in De Luca's shimmering sentences, of history stretching back much further than that, far out of living memory. ‘The city contains all eras,’ we're told. ‘Our building and its residents are the Middle Ages in modern dress.’

Having got (disproportionately) huffy about the way the Neapolitan language is skated over in Ferrante, I was psyched to see it get such lavish attention here. Neapolitan phrases are scattered throughout the text, including a bittersweet line from the boy's mentor – T'aggia 'mpara' e t'aggia perdere, I have to teach you, and then I have to let you go – which becomes a kind of emotional refrain, building power as it goes. Neapolitan, we are told,

is made for storytelling. You tell someone something and they believe you. In standard Italian there's always some doubt: did I hear that right? Italian is great for writing, when you don't need a voice, but to tell a story, you want our language, which holds it all together and helps you to see it. Neapolitan invites fantasy. It opens up your eyes and ears.

That line about how it ‘invites fantasy’ connected with especial force, since I just finished Basile's The Tale of Tales, translated from Neapolitan. And that wasn't the only thing in here that struck unexpected chords with other books I've read about Naples – the boy's nickname is 'a scigna, ‘the monkey’, which I remember Roberto Saviano mentioning in Gomorrah as being the nickname of one of the Camorra capos. (A camorrista features as an important secondary character in this book, too.) I do love it when books, all unknowingly, call out to each other like this.

I found De Luca's writing very beautiful, and sensitively translated by Jill Foulston (who handles the male pubescence sections without a stumble). But what's most remarkable about this book – and perhaps that historical context has something to do with it – is how much power it seems to generate with such a restrained word-count. It's a story that comes with a very deeply-felt sense of place; by the time you finish it, you really feel like you've been living there. And our ingenuous scugnizzo narrator – ‘easily bewildered, with faraway eyes’ – is the perfect stand-in to run awestruck through the courtyards, and meet the city's ghosts, on your behalf. show less

Great piece of poetic prose about growing up, learning, loving, losing, fighting and leaving. In a word, Living.

I bought this book at the airport on the strength of its first line:

"Scoprii il nascondiglio perché c'era finito il pallone."

"I discovered the hiding place because the ball ended up there." (my translation).

Simple, yet containing multitudes...

Un bambino che cresce orfano nella Napoli del dopoguerra, col portinaio un po' padre putativo e un po' maestro di vita, con i primi amori, la passione per la cultura, lo scontro con l'anima nera della città.
Uno degli incredibili romanzi di formazione di Erri de Luca, com sempre poetico, saggio, irresistibile, scritto in un linguaggio che della semplicità fa autentico lirismo. Un capolavoro.

Si diventa uomini grazie a uomini che lo sono già.Si diventa uomini quando si impara ad ascoltare i pensieri delle persone, non la chiamare gente,sono persone,una per una.Si diventa uomini e tutti lo vedono,senza alcun rito necessario. Il rito sarà  quello della vita da adulti.

In Naples, immediately after World War II, a young orphan
comes under the protection of Don Gaetano, the porter of an
old building. A generous man, Don Gaetano tells him about
the war and the liberation of the city, teaches him to play
cards and initiates him into the world of sex by sending him to
a widow who lives in the building. But Don Gaetano
possesses another gift as well: he knows how to read
people's thoughts and sees that his young friend is haunted
by the image of a girl he noticed by chance during a football
match. Years later, when the girl returns, the orphan will need
Don Gaetano's help more than ever.
Erri De Luca (Author)
Born in Naples in 1950, Erri De Luca is one of Italy's
bestselling novelists, whose work has been translated show more into
many languages. He was awarded the France Culture Prize in
1994, the Fémina Etranger in 2002 and, in 2013, he received
the European Prize for Literature. He is also a translator from
Ancient Hebrew and Yiddish. A passionate mountain climber,
he currently lives in the countryside near Rome. show less

[a:Erri De Luca|25319|Erri De Luca|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1213226032p2/25319.jpg] is one of Italy's most popular authors; he's also garnered critical praise, such as being named "author of the decade" (2001-2010) by the Corriere della Sera. He typically publishes short works, several each year, in fiction, essay, and poetry. This one is only 175 pages in English, but that makes it one of his major novels. It's the third De Luca novel to be translated by [a:Michael F. Moore|467929|Michael F. Moore|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg], and the fourth to be published by Other Press; they're working to build a name for De Luca in the U.S. commensurate with his stature in Italy. [Disclosure: I was given show more this book by an Other Press rep when I expressed curiosity about De Luca.]

The Day Before Happiness is told by a nameless orphan, growing up in a Naples apartment block in the 1950s, as the city is still recovering from the devastation of World War II. Most of his education to adulthood comes from Don Gaetano, the building's porter: think of the superintendent of an urban American working-class apartment building. During the war, Don Gaeta' hid a Jew from the German occupiers in a cellar under the building, excavated in Naples' volcanic bedrock; during the American occupation, he let smugglers use the cellar as a depository for their contraband. Don Gaeta' teaches the boy to play the Neapolitan card game scopa, takes him to Vesuvius, sends him out to fish with a friend from Ischia, and launches him as a handyman (and as the kind of "handyman" the building's lonely young widow requires). He teaches the boy how to fight with a knife and how to win the love of the little girl he'd admired from afar, now returned to the building as a grown woman.

Don Gaetano's voice thus dominates The Day Before Happiness, and translator Moore makes it distinct, but I don't think he succeeds in making it realistic for an American reader. First of all, the prose throughout—both the narration and the dialogue—is riddled with comma splices and run-on sentences. That may be a customary way of representing informal speech in Italian, but in the U.S., in any writing that's remotely literary, it's a solecism that sticks out like a sore thumb. Moore also makes a great effort to replicate Don Gaetano's wordplay at the expense of the illiterate cobbler La Capa, but the setups for the puns he substitutes in English tend to bog down the scenes and kill the comedy. (Yes, it's incredibly hard to do this well, but we shouldn't just throw up our hands and say only [a:Barbara Wright|225207|Barbara Wright|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg] translating [a:Raymond Queneau|15957|Raymond Queneau|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1225922573p2/15957.jpg] could manage it.) Finally, much of the dialogue is in Neapolitan dialect, the pronunciation of which is so clipped and twisted relative to standard Italian that many consider it a distinct, incomprehensible language. Moore presents these lines in italics in their original language, followed by an em-dash and the English translation; the effect is of suddenly reading subtitles in a movie mainly in English, taking the reader out of the fictional trance and reminding him that the text is translated. All of these translation decisions could be justified as desirable "foreignization" of the translated text for the American reader, but they bring me into the translator's mind rather than the author's..

My other complaint about the novel, which I assume to come from the Italian original (I haven't read it), is its overwritten prose and melodramatic scenes. The narrator comes to sexual maturity as a direct result of climbing Vesuvius: his body surprises him with the unfamiliar urge to masturbate, straight into the volcanic mist at the summit (p. 57). When, later, his childhood love-object Anna inexplicably reappears and offers her body to him, she bites him on the neck, drawing blood (vampire metaphor much?), which mixes on the sheets with the blood from her virginity. She tells him: "It's ours, it is the ink of our pact. You placed inside me your initial, which I awaited intact. I will give it a body and a name" (p. 101). Wince-making scenes and lines like these do their best to spoil an otherwise well-observed story of coming of age in a particularly interesting time and place. (Believe me, the second star of my rating is only grudgingly given.) The novel's climax even approaches the archetypal purity of Borges' tales of Argentine knife fights—but by that point, our experience of the narrator's self-indulgence and introspection has made it impossible to see him as a hero, even a deeply flawed one. I ended up questioning the taste and judgment of the Italian readers who, apparently, loved this book.

Here are notes I took of other problematic passages:
p. 15: "For us it was about stealing freedom, for him it was about his life. And his life was hanging from someone who could betray him or be arrested, murdered, and not come back to him with something to eat." Here, "hanging from" is almost certainly a mistranslation that should be "depended on."
p. 59: "Studied at school, the universe was a table set for guests with a telescope." I can tell what it means, but there's no grammatical way to construe it.
p. 72: On hearing the word "outrage," the illiterate La Capa says—translated from Neapolitan—"No one is raging out here." Explaining the joke doesn't make us laugh.
p. 79: Anna, describing herself, says, "Today someone like that is called autistic." But in the late '50s, when she's speaking, the term autistic certainly was not in common use, in Italy or the U.S.
p. 90: "Except for the few and the worst, no one had a spirit of adventure." Meaning, I think: except for a few, the worst among them.
p. 106: The "true color of the sea" is white—"From within, nature must be white." But then on p. 107, "the wind was stripping the white off the sea." Is the white on the inside, or on the surface?
p. 128: The narrator says: "Since yesterday I've been going around trying to find whom I should resemble." "Whom" here may be, very strictly, correct, but nowadays it's so uncommon it's become marked as a hypercorrection, and it's certainly not appropriate in spoken language.
p. 138: "He needed to separate them..." There's no antecedent for this "he"; it probably should be a generic pronoun, a "he who" or a "someone."
p. 141: Don Gaetano says: "The crèche is for persons with children and are teaching them to love the holy story." Should that be "and who are"? (The resulting sentence is still clumsy and unnatural as dialogue, but at least would make sense.)
p. 149: "By her there was warmth, she opened in a dressing gown..." After a minute, I figured out that the second clause referred to the woman (the lonely widow) opening the door while wearing a dressing gown. But the "By her" still stymies me—it's like the translation, of what I can only assume is a reference to the widow's apartment, took a detour through the German preposition "bei." show less

I am sorry but I was unable to get through this book. It simply did not hold my interest which was surprising since the readers gave it a 3.89 rating