The Officers' Camp

In a thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, historian Carocci gives a simple, straightforward and largely satisfying account of the events following Italy's withdrawal from WWII in September 1943. A former officer in the Italian Army, Carocci was seen as a traitor by the Germans, and he and his fellow officers were imprisoned in work camps. In an introduction that basically previews the book to come, Carocci paradoxically calls his 22 months in prison ""the finest period of my life."" The facts do not bear that claim out, of course, and even ""Caro"" gets a wry, retrospective laugh out of his excitement at becoming one of the proletariat when made to wear overalls and work in a factory. Carocci's spare style and his eye for everyday detail serve his story well, and an accomplished translation maintains the clarity of a tale in which the main activity is simply being hungry (upon the death of a friend, Caro discovers that the man kept a notebook that contained, in tiny script, every recipe he knew). The routines of camp life--trading cigarettes for bread with Russian prisoners, peering eagerly at the well-fed American prisoners, seeing a friend shot and killed--are engrossing, but their flow is hampered by several long and important exchanges left in the original German or Russian with no footnotes. Still, few will remain unmoved by Carocci's lengthy, slow journey home to Florence. (June)