Blame it on Italy’s marathon Holiday celebrations. When Rome’s glassy megabookshops deeply salespitched Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini’s cartoon bookcovers. Visions of Beppe’s impish front-jacket face danced in our heads.
As an owl-eyed little man wearing granddad’s oversize overcoat, he peers out at us with childlike curiosity. The classic innocent voyager. Amazed visitor to new worlds. Come to tell us what he’s learned about: America, England, whatever!
Currently he’s running a deft cyber blog about and for “Italians,” an instant Q/A for readers of the daily Corriere della Sera. Even in this cyber world he advertises his published shelf. It’s also about Italians, at home or abroad.
Obvious Q: if the blog intrigues, do more and better Severgnini answers live in the book world? Though he’s quick-witted as a reporter, the book answer is no.
Putting page upon page, the man rambles. Not because he doesn’t imitate organized thought. He even formats chapters by calendar: monthly, yearly. Yet his catchy-title infotainments stir no thought, address no questions. In contrast the Corriere journalist taps out astute response, once a reader defines and blogs the question. But book length work? Fluff packed in colored cardboard.
From his shelf, one sample specimen. ”An Italian in America” (1995) makes good sum of this reporter’s book style and class. It reveals subscription to publishing’s 180 degree swing: from dust-cover books to book-cover commodities. Despite mild sales both sides of the Atlantic, bookshelves got stocked with ’97, 2001 and 2006 editions- all lacking adequate update and copyediting. Meanwhile the very same book came out, in medias res, in 2003. But with a deceptively new title and cover: ”Ciao America: An Italian Discovers the U.S.”. This is publishing chutzpah on a Guinness level.
So much activity generally signals a strong, targeted market. What could that be?
Hard to say. Because both Italians and Americans have long known the bromides here-named contents. Severgnini bypasses high profile but more explosive culture signals.
From year-long D.C. stay, the journalist extracts jokey asides, inserted with baton precision in monthly chapters about… little. The tale begins and ends with view of an apparently pointless stone cupid in a garden’s empty stone birdbath. This relates to nothing in the book itself. However it shrewdly re-establishes the tone of puzzled, observing voyager.
What’s he observing in the U.S. of A.?
Unluckily for a writer who pretends report on “an ordinary America,” that garden backs his white clapboard home in D.C’s historic and expensive Georgetown section. Turf to the moneyed and overprivileged. He’d need a periscope to catch barest glimpse of the “ordinary America” trapped in lost suburban enclaves. Those other pleasant clapboard houses, fronting sidewalks so empty they suggest a sudden and forced population emigration.
Another piece of bad luck. He assumes either Americans or Italians (or both?) ache to know that Americans: live in an “air conditioned nightmare”; eat Spam (sic); picnic at Fourth of July fireworks displays. Had he really been curious, any Italian who watches the ubiquitous American TV serials could have told him all that. And saved the transatlantic trip.
There is a single, poignant section revealing the astute Corriere writer. On weekend trip, at a Pancake House road stop, he watches what he coolly calls “an underclass” family at another table. They gorge their “butter and fries” meal. Away from his clearly not “underclass” Georgetown neighborhood, its diplomats and government powers, he reflects: these other people have a taste for the ugly. Yet, he marvels, “they behave with decency….. The mere fact of being American-even when America has given you very little-seems to imply a mystic consensus. The fact you are Italian-even when Italy has given you everything-for many of my compatriots doesn’t appear to mean anything at all.”
Bingo. That was the book this Italian in America could have written. Didn’t. Chose, instead, moldy clichés. Put them between two covers. Sold them as a “book.” Interesting to note that the “b” word continues to claim intellectual aura.
What is it that stops a reader from tossing his brightly packaged volumes of, at best, half-truths? Probably, his genuine talent for odd social tidbit as comic anecdote. While union-bashing in his embarrassingly dated “An Italian in Britain,” he suddenly breaks off. Just came to mind: there’s a run on red Russian flags in Moscow stores. Reason? The upcoming fashion season will highlight red pants.
Not a big joke.
But it maintains his standard: a funny every three/four paragraphs. Jokes are simple and rapidly evoked incongruities. He sells a word-chuckle proportion calculated to keep reader eyes attached to all those pages. Skimming lightly to the last line. Skimming. Lightly.
Even for a clever journalist, a book may overexpose the devious shallows. Why choose it?
1.) the prestigious “b” word.
2.) a clue in his account of an Italian visitor, charming Severgnini’s reporter colleagues in London: “I doubt that he was telling the truth, but I admire the opportunism of his lie.”
Self-knowledge is a wonderful thing.
— Patricia E. Fogarty’s column “Scriptorium” appears monthly.
