Title: The Viceroys - Gérard De Cortanze - book
Summary :
Historical Novel Prize 1998
There are novels that peacefully envelop you in a river of events. Others that seem written in one go, in the fever of their plot. Vast as a fresco, but carried by a tension that never ceases to grow, The Viceroys is perhaps a combination of both. Inspired by the memories of an aristocratic family who immigrated to France, this great "genealogical" tale recounts some sixty years of European history, from the beginnings of Italian unification to Mussolini's seizure of power, by way of the uprising against Austria, the Battle of Solferino, Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily, the exploits and reversals of fortune of a Piedmontese marquis, his exile in Marseille and then Paris in a climate of xenophobia, the birth of motor racing, the dirty war of a stretcher-bearer from 1914-1918, and finally his triumphs at the wheel of the first Bugattis. Against this vast backdrop, Gerardo da Cortanze depicted the lives of a father and son with parallel destinies but contradictory aspirations. The former, Ercole Tommaso, carrying the weight of a family inextricably linked to Piedmontese royalty, turned his back on the new Italy of banks, industrialization, and the "single currency." The second, Roberto, raised in an anti-Italian France, searches in vain for his place between Marseille (and its everyday racism), Paris during the Belle Époque, the Italy of Futurism and early Fascism, and even more so in the intoxicating automobile competitions that then unleashed passions - and which the prevailing nationalism would soon erect into patriotic symbols... A novel of formation, a book of exile and, despite everything, of memory, a story marked by an ancient art of living and by the upheavals of modernity, this text never fails to amaze by the topicality of the themes and mentalities it crystallizes. But the adventure of the Viceroys in this convulsive Europe is also luminously illuminated by a few women - in particular Luisa and Diodata, the unfaithful wife and the nonconformist poetess - who both embody, in their own way, the secret part or the insubordination of love. Suffice to say that it is really only a question, here, of the quest for happiness...
