cover image Partisan Wedding: Stories by Renata Vigano

Partisan Wedding: Stories by Renata Vigano

Renata Vigano. University of Missouri Press, $24.95 (248pp) ISBN 978-0-8262-1228-3

The recent popularity of WWII films like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line may help promote interest in this Italian writer's work, which remains mostly unknown in the U.S. First published in 1976, the year of Vigan 's death, the 17 stories and two autobiographical pieces that make up this collection are told from the perspective of anti-Fascist Italian partisans during the war. The title story chronicles a tragically abbreviated love affair, carried on at a partisan safe house. ""Peter"" highlights the strange associations that war creates: a Russian prisoner-of-war finds refuge with an Italian family while wearing the uniform of his German captors. Many of the stories focus on the role of women in the Resistance. Women could often pass unnoticed as couriers, but, once discovered, their lack of weapons made them especially vulnerable, as in ""Wool Socks,"" in which a seemingly innocent item betrays Tiny, a young partisan on a delivery run. As it did men, the Resistance offered women an opportunity to reinvent themselves. ""Nigrein loved her battle name,"" writes Vigan in ""Trap Shoot."" ""She had almost forgotten her real name, Adelia, which seemed too bombastic and solemn for her."" Though her fiction makes palpable the constant tensions and hazards of partisan life, Vigan 's Marxist politics, especially in the autobiographical essays, seem dated: `I was not born working class. Therefore, I did not have the great lesson of a hard childhood, of parents who were exhausted by difficult jobs, by daily deprivations."" Branciforte's translation is only serviceable, but she provides a useful introduction that chronicles Vigan 's youth, her experiences in the Resistance and her career as a writer after the war. (Nov.)