Still trying to get over this horrible cough/cold. My lungs feel more compromised than a Victorian maiden caught skinny dipping with the stable boy. So I’ve been sleeping and reading, since nothing else is happening. Reading inevitably turns to my "comfort reads."
Giovanni Guareschi remains – to my mind – the best writer of short short fiction (Not flash. His stories run about 1 to 2 k words, I’d guess) who ever worked. This is probably a personal quirk of mine, predicated on having read him when I was very young, but maybe not. You judge. The stories are set in post WWII Italy, all the way to the sixties. The later sixties stories are not as good, but the man was getting old, after all.
The thing is with the coldwar setup and the communist mayor and the catholic priest as the main characters you’d expect a spy vs. spy cartoonish thing. It’s not even close. I re-read these books every fall to figure out how he does things with a minimal fuss. I buy his books used and new, when I can and give them to all and sundry, as much as I give Techniques Of The Selling Writer.
As an illustration, I’m copying below about two and a half pages of Technique of the Coup D’Etat, first published in Don Camillo and the Prodigal Son (though I have it in The Don Camillo Omnibus.)
So, here is Technique of the Coup D’Etat, by Giovanni Guareschi, translated by Frances Frenaye – follow if you will how he develops danger and sheer blood chilling creepiness without ever SAYING anything about it.
Technique of The Coup D’Etat by Giovanni Guareschi, translated by Frances Fernaye (Typos mine.)
At ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, the village square was swept with wind and rain, but a crowd had been gathered there for three or four hours to listen to the election news coming out of a radio loudspeaker. Suddenly the lights went out and everything was plunged into darkness. Someone went to the control box but came back saying there was nothing to be done. The trouble must be up the line or at the power plant, miles away. People hung around for half an hour or so, and then, as the rain began to come down even harder than before, they scattered to their homes, leaving the village silent and deserted. Peppone shut himself up in the People’s Palace, along with Lungo, Brusco, Straziami, and Gigio, the same leader of the "Red Wing" squad from Molinetto. They sat around uneasily by the light of a candle stump and cursed the power and light monopoly as an enemy of the people, until Smilzo burst in. He had gone to Rocca Verde on his motorcycle to see if anyone had news and now his eyes were popping out of his head and he was waving a sheet of paper.
"The Front has won!" he panted. "Fifty-two seats out of a hundred in the senate and fifty-one in the chamber. The other side is done for. We must get hold of our people and have a celebration. If there’s no light, we can set fire to a couple of haystacks nearby.
According To Hoyt 