M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati

M: Son of the Century
By Antonio Scurati
Translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel
Harper, 2022

Antonio Scurati’s much-lauded novel M. Il figlio del secolo first appeared in 2018, won the prestigious Strega Prize in 2019, and enjoyed hundreds of thousands in sales. It was the first installment in a projected historical fiction trilogy about Benito Mussolini and the life of Italy from 1919, when Italian Fascism came into being, to the end of the story in 1945, with this first volume bringing things down to the very beginning of 1925, when Mussolini declared that Italy was now a dictatorship under his control.

Quite a few sweaty speeches, quite a few hard, quick flashes of violence, quite a few sordid compromises, crowd into those few years between the furtive, bumbling, big-dreaming rag-newspaper editor and “Il Duce,” and those years form the unlikely subject matter of this first novel in the arc, now appearing in English as M: Son of the Century in an absolutely stunning translation by Anne Milano Appel. 

“Unlikely” puts it mildly, but there are precedents, including one of the biggest in modern literary history. In 2009 Hilary Mantel took a violent, brutish thug named Thomas Cromwell and turned him into the hero of a trilogy without ever making him unambiguously heroic. At no point in Wolf Hall are readers asked to consider Cromwell any kind of saint, but the one-dimensional villainy of the figure in such works as A Man for All Seasons is exploded brilliantly. 

Scurati here attempts the same feat and succeeds every bit as brilliantly. His young Mussolini is a political theorist, a reader and thinker, a passionate, mordantly aggrieved believer, at first one dog in a crowded pack of figures striving to seize an Italy still reeling from war and economic destabilization and reshape it into any one of half a dozen new forms. Scurati shifts the narrative focus among half a dozen characters, each of whom is nose-down in the minutiae of early 20th-century Italian politics, each of whom is in some way haunted by the country’s violent recent past. “For them,” the narrative runs, “power is a canasta game played among old acquaintances at the table of an exclusive club somewhere on the hill.” To Mussolini himself, it increasingly seems that “humanity can be divided according to the positions it assumes in the face of metal shards.” 

One index of skill in any work of historical fiction like this is its ability to maintain suspense despite the fact that the reader already knows how the story turns out. Any even casual history buff knows that Mussolini will be the winner of the political and ideological melee that fills these pages with guessing games; indeed, thanks to the macabre art of photography, readers creep through this book reading about a striding, striving young man while the whole time having in their mind’s eye the infamous photo of an older Mussolini’s corpse strung upside-down like a hog in an abattoir. 

The dissonance is only initially jarring, after which Scurati’s skill completely subsumes it. This novel is entirely full of living and even immortal figures, fiery young men and women embracing the future and Futurism (“Their watchwords are those of futurism,” we’re told: “synthetic, cheerful, swift, presentist, practical, modern”). The architects of Futurism, figures like Marinetti and Boccioni, share the stage with far more nuanced characters, particularly the strange and spikey insurgent poet Gabriele D’annunzio, “the one-eyed man with ankylosis,” who fired the imaginations of “the bored young idealists, the decadent scions of a sated, exhausted bourgeoisie, who might well be willing to risk their lives but not to make their own beds.” D’annunzio’s prickly and often hypnotic pull on Mussolini is one of the book’s most consistently compelling split visions, revolving around the fact that “the biggest letdown that reality had in store for us is that it never resembles a poem.” 

M: Son of the Century nonetheless belongs entirely to “Mussolini, the herald of interventionism,” and readers are drawn into his passions, disappointments, and increasingly illicit aspirations. The result is magnificently, disturbingly mesmerizing. The second book in the series, M: Man of Destiny, can’t arrive in English soon enough.

-Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.