Bookish Déjà-Vu: Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante

A small island can be a very quiet and private place to live in provided that it’s sparsely populated and outside the usual shipping routes. In our ever closer connected world – really and digitally – there may be only few such islands left, but until not too long ago even the people living on the islands in the Gulf of Naples were quite on their own although the big city on the mainland is all but far-off. A boy who grew up on one of these islands, on Procida to be precise, in the 1920s and 1930s is the protagonist of the Italian classical novel Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante that I picked as another bookish déjà-vu. With his mother died in childbirth and his father away most of the time, Arturo enjoys a carefree and unrestricted childhood until his father takes a new wife hardly older than the adolescent boy.
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