Fatuzzo Books Blog

MY FATHER’S NOVEL – A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE, by Ennio Fatuzzo

An incredible story. An Italian book, “buried” in the North-African sands of time and war for decades, that I have been able to bring back to life for English speaking readers. It is my father’s novel – a saga of sweeping landscapes, an exotic young girl, and a tormented mind – and it is beautiful literature.

LOST AND FOUND

“Two Souls in the Sun” (Due anime nel sole}, written by my father (Giacomo Fatuzzo), was published in 1929, in Italian, in Italy’s colony of Libya. And then it was forgotten. The publisher ceased to exist long ago, my father is dead, and I only had vague memories of the book’s existence. But my daughter, Laura Fatuzzo, found a copy, covered with dust, buried among old documents belonging to my mother. Laura read it and was captivated by the emotional saga and her grandfather’s exquisite descriptions. She challenged me read it, and I was equally fascinated. The feelings, the torment, the mixture of dreams, dark desires, and reality – compelling and unlike the father I thought I knew, So, I translated my father’s timeless story of a lonely soldier into English; and with the editing assistance of my wife Carol, we published it, making it accessible to today’s serious readers. “Two Souls in the Sun” is now available in English in paperback and Kindle formats from amazon.com.

MY FATHER

My father, born in Sicily in 1900, was an Italian career army officer. From what I can reconstruct, as a young officer he spent almost 10 years (from the early-to-mid 1920s to the early 1930s) on assignment in the wild African desert of Italy’s colony of Libya. He was in command of a group of local troops who were responsible for guarding the borders of the Italian territory. He could scarcely communicate with his men, and most of the time he had no colleagues with whom to talk. His only personal interactions were his occasional visits to young Arab girls in a nearby brothel. Alone in a foreign land, isolated by language and culture from those around him, he wrote a story in which he posed daunting questions for himself and his readers: How well do we really know ourselves? Is almost anyone capable of murder? Is madness always looming? My father’s work explores these questions as well as the effects of prolonged silence and solitude on the human soul, including the ultimate toll isolation can take on the human mind. Clearly, in his novel, he was expressing many of his own thoughts and feelings.

A NOVEL OR A MEMOIR OR SOMETHING IN BETWEEN

“Two Souls in the Sun” is the story of a lonely, young, Italian army officer who wanders through the vast dessert that was the Libya of almost 100 years ago – as my father did. It unveils unfamiliar and desolate landscapes of breathtaking beauty and power, and it describes the strange yet enticing people and customs that the young officer encounters. Day by day, the book reveals a mind that wanders farther and farther from what it has known and begins to generate chaotic thoughts that are a mixture of dreams, dark desires, and reality. A second, more brutal “self” emerges – someone wild, angry, and very different from the lonely Italian officer. As his second “self” becomes stronger, the young officer becomes obsessed with one specific prostitute. But is she real? His mind mixes his hallucinations with his memories; and interwoven with all of this is his enchantment with the wildness and power of the desert itself. It is unclear where reality becomes delusion as the saga winds through the vast desert of Northern Africa and the young officer descends into madness.

Ultimately the reader faces a fundamental question: Who are the two souls in the sun – the officer and his prostitute or the two selves of the officer? And my thoughts always return to other questions: Is this just a story or is it partly a chronicle of my father’s actual experiences? What really happened, and what was imagined? Is this totally a novel or is it partially or even mostly a memoir? There is no way to know the answers to these questions, even for me, the author’s own son. Therefore, it is up to the reader to decide. What is clear is that my father, as a young officer, turned his lonely time in a foreign desert into a fascinating exploration of the psychology of human nature and the effects of solitude. His novel is truly a literary journey into the depths of one’s soul.

For more information about “Two Souls in the Sun” and all of the other books published by Fatuzzo Books, visit the Web site fatuzzobooks.com.