The World is a Prison

Despite its metaphorical title, this captivating memoir is filled with all-too-real prisons of the dank, dark variety. In May 1944, Petroni (1911-1993) was arrested by Italy's Fascist government for participating in a political demonstration. Over the next month, as Allied troops advanced, he was transferred from one dismal cell to another with no idea of his ultimate fate. Finally, on June 4, the Allies reached Rome and he escaped. From today's vantage, perhaps, Petroni's ordeal seems relatively mild: he never saw the horrors of the concentration camps and, by his own admission, imprisoned intellectuals were accorded special treatment, handled with ""a kind of awe."" Still, conditions were severe enough. Beatings and casual death threats were commonplace, and the prisons were filthy. At one point, Petroni recalls waking up with his cheeks and torso coated in blood--as he had moved in his sleep, he explains, he had crushed hundreds of bedbugs. In other cells, he had no bed at all, no light and little food. Through it all, he maintained his sanity and his dignity by retreating into an emotional shell. That reticence lends the memoir a haunting tone of preternatural calm, a plainspokenness the translator has preserved well. It also lets Petroni abandon his gripping prison narrative at times to meditate instead on heroism, human solitude and the life of the mind. Simultaneously hopeful and despairing, convinced ""it would be better not to be born, since often there are no solutions to the human condition,"" Petroni nonetheless makes the best of his situation, and leaves prison with ""the will to join somehow in the sufferings and joys of others."" In the end, his memoir is a stark and eloquent testament to the virtues of fortitude and forbearance. (Nov.) FYI: The World Is a Prison was published in Italy in 1948 and has remained in print almost continuously.