Brancati was a disillusioned Sicilian fascist when he came to write The Lost Years, which was first published (in a rapidly suppressed magazine) at the height of the fascist era in 1938. The ‘lost years’ are the years of youth and hope, squandered in the inert atmosphere of a town like the one he calls ‘Natacà’ in provincial Sicily. The major problem for the young people of Natacà is how to wile away the day, how to pass the evening (stay in bed, hang around, hang around some more...). Brancati’s genius lies in transforming the leaden boredom that often afflicts adolescence into an entertaining and ironic work of art that is often wildly amusing. It’s not just 1930s Sicily that is caught on the skewer: the digestive recourses of small town life — menfolk lying supine beneath the weight of their bellies, waiting for their massive bulk ‘to exhale its legs of pork, its wines, its farinaceous foods, and once more become light and portable’— might seem familiar wherever people who gather round tables have more facility for plate-clearing than conversation.


More seriously, the book is also a document of the social and moral atmosphere of Italy under fascism, a document of everyday fascism that illustrates how little compromises eventually add up to big, bloody ones. As one character puts it, people ‘jettison morality like ballast’ when they realise the boat is sinking: ‘The first law of morality is to live. The second is to win. The third is to obey the law of morality.’


At the centre of the book is the construction of a marvellous tower from which to view the surrounding landscape: a monument which will, the locals hope, put Natacà on the map, bringing trade and progress and washing out the boredom and inertia that is stifling the town. What actually becomes of this project in ‘the country of hitches and delays’ you must read for yourself, but be sure that somehow Natacà still didn’t much change, nor did its people become much wiser.

‘Prone in bed in the dark is the most felicitous position for killing time, now letting your eyes close, now lending an ear to the street noises, now to the flies hunting daylight at the crack between the shutters; sometimes nodding off, at others thinking thoughts that could be easily the hem of a dream, you slip from eight to eleven — hey presto! In a jiffy.’p30