Individual Trauma and Bombturbation: World War II in Italy, in M. Ondaatje and H. Janeczek

The Second World War has been a traumatic experience for all of Europe, but also globally. Literature, like a seismograph, has naturally testified such a terrible trauma. In particular, it is worth noting that the Sri-Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje has dedicated two novels to the Warscape of Italy. After the great international success of both novel and film, The English Patient (1994), he lately wrote Warlight (2018) a spy fiction set in Trieste at the end-of-war years between Italy and Britain. However, noteworthy is also the novel by the Polish-Italian novelist Elena Janeczek's Le rondini di Montecassino (2010), a moving and historically accurate reconstruction of the siege of Cassino and its almost impossible liberation, together with a heartbreaking description of poverty-torn Italy. The gaze of a Māori citizen come to visit the War Cemetery, in order to retrace his grandfather's heroic deeds, adds a further antipodean voice from the ex-Commonwealth to reconcile a landscape with each and everyone's loss. Those literary works and the film will be explored and analysed through the framework of Trauma studies (Caruth, La Capra) and Stratigraphy (Zalasiewicz).