The Betrothed and the Novel 100.

So the two weeks off between posts shouldn’t be the norm, but it took me about twelve days to finish off Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. Before I get to that book, though, I thought it might be worth taking a moment to explain how I choose some of these books, especially the classics.

I’m a lists guy, which is no surprise to those of you who read my ESPN stuff. I love lists and rankings, both for the debates they generate and, in the case of stuff like books or albums or restaurants, for the way you can work through them yourself. My favorite book-ranking is a book in itself, and probably one of the best gifts my wife has ever bought me: The Novel 100, by Daniel Burt. The book itself contains Burt’s rankings of the 100 greatest novels ever written, with a four-page essay on each book that summarizes its plot, discusses the author and his influences, then talks about how the book was received at the time it was published and how it is viewed today.

When I got the book, I was all cocky and thought I was so well-read and probably had already read 30-40 of the books on the list. I was wrong – I was only at sixteen, and had never even heard of close to half of the titles. This, of course, was a personal affront, and a challenge not to be declined, so for the last two-plus years I’ve been plowing through the books, a few of which (Lawrence’s Women in Love, James’ The Ambassadors, the latter of which I didn’t even finish) were duds but some of which are now among my all-time favorites, including The Betrothed.

(I’d like to publish the list of titles, without his essays, and if I can reach Prof. Burt I’ll do so. In the meantime, I believe the top 10 are Don Quixote, War and Peace, Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain, and The Tale of Genji.)

The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) is one of the earliest historical novels, the greatest novel in the canon of Italian literature, and a work that was influenced by and then in turn influenced a number of great English writers. The story revolves around the engagement between two young peasants, Renzo and Lucia, whose wedding is blocked by the local lord, Don Rodrigo, who saw Lucia in the street and has decided as part of a bet with his cousin that he will seduce Lucia for himself. Renzo and Lucia flee and end up separated, leading to two story lines that eventually connect again in the end.

That plot (separated lovers) isn’t all that uncommon, but Manzoni adds two wrinkles to make this novel unique. One is the introduction of some amazing secondary characters, including the Nun of Monza (based on a real person) and the fiend only known as the Unnamed. Each of them receives his or her own short story within the novel, and while I ordinarily find that sort of thing distracting, it works here because those stories are themselves very compelling.

The other twist, one I didn’t care for as much, was a very long digression in the novel’s last third where Manzoni describes the twin tragedies that hit the Italian states and particularly Milan in the late 1620s, when the novel is set. Milan was first beset by a famine that was largely caused by idiotic economic policies (like arbitrary price ceilings), and then was hit by the Black Death, introduced by invading soldiers and facilitated by the inaction of the local governments. It is a withering criticism, one that makes Manzoni something of a literary forerunner of Friedrich Hayek, but it is more history than story, and the tangent from the main plot line is extremely long.

The writing itself is crisp, and a lot of aspects of the prose and the story reminded me of Tom Jones, another book on the Novel 100 and my favorite picaresque novel. It’s a bit overlong due to that late bit on Milanese history, but otherwise well worth its heft.