In a remote monastery perched perilously on top of a crag in Piedmont, Italy, an old man lies dying. Thirty-two monks stand vigil at the deathbed; “Mimo” Vitaliani has lived among them for 40 years, yet few of them know exactly why. Nor did Vitaliani come alone, but with a mysterious statue that is kept under lock and key in the depths of the Sacra di San Michele, a pietà depicting the Virgin Mary mourning over the body of Christ, whose faces must not be seen. And all the while, the abbot tiptoes around the dying man, waiting for a word. These and others are the mysteries French writer Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s prize-winning fourth novel sets out to solve, mapped on to the course of an extraordinary century in the history of a resilient, self-sabotaging and remarkable nation.
Born in France to Italian parents in 1904, at the dawn of a new world order, Mimo is destined never quite to fit (nor, incidentally, ever to grow taller than 4ft 6in). His father was a stone carver who had hubris enough to christen the boy Michelangelo before getting himself conscripted and blown to bits; Mimo refuses the name, and yet finds himself taking up the art all the same.
Shipped off at 12 to Turin as an apprentice to the reluctant Zio Alberto – an uncle who isn’t an uncle – Mimo has to overcome his stature, his rootlessness and his prodigious natural talent, which seems to do nothing but rub people up the wrong way. When the apprentice turns 16, Zio Alberto moves his workshop to the country and the pair arrive in the lofty rose-coloured Ligurian village of Pietra d’Alba, “carved out of the sunrise”, where Mimo sees his first pietà, carves his first cherub – and meets the one person with whom he feels he belongs: Viola Orsini.
Scion of a noble family whose orange groves carpet the plateau, sister to three brothers – Virgilio, a would-be soldier, Stefano, a troublemaker who dabbles in politics, and Francesco, a priest – Viola is as much at odds with her world as Mimo is with his. A scientist, an inventor, a futurist, a voracious reader with a photographic memory and, according to local rumour, shapeshifting powers, Viola wishes to fly like poet-pilot Gabriele d’Annunzio, but her parents require her to marry money and reproduce. And the “repulsive little creature” who falls into her bedroom while undertaking repairs on the Orsini roof is a long way from their idea of marriage material.
In secret, though, the pair cling to each other. Cosmic twins, contrarians desirous of a new world, and the oddest of couples, each has found his or her match for stubbornness and determination. But Mimo and Viola were born into “a century that moves too fast”: by 1920, fascism in Italy is on the march, and politics, family, Viola’s recklessness and Mimo’s “somewhat suicidal temperament, professionally speaking” soon separate them. They must each navigate the future their worlds impose upon them. Viola is to be an aristocratic mother, when her heart is set on forging progress; Mimo is set on a pedestal as a “fascist artist”, derided as a “degenerate dwarf” and lauded as a partisan hero, when he simply wants to sculpt. Thus a pattern is set in motion – of exile and reconciliation, triumph and disaster – that will last the rest of their lives.
The narrative is enjoyable and gripping in a combination not often found in prestigious prize winners, and it takes a page or two to understand why this big fat historical blockbuster won the Prix Goncourt. But even in translation – and this is a fluid example of the craft – its poetry and its nuance, its passion and philosophical depth, its grasp of moral ambiguity, its clever interweaving of history and fiction, and its superlative characterisation rise quickly to the surface.
Contrary, self-sabotaging Mimo, “disagreeable” by his own estimate, is a masterly creation, as is his proud, mercurial, impatient soulmate. But the novel is also rich in smaller characters, from the lazy Machiavellian Stefano to hardworking Vittorio, whose otherworldly twin brother Emmanuele is prone to speaking in tongues and dressing up in ragtag begged-and-borrowed uniforms: a clue to the note that sounds loudest in Watching Over Her. Because this is most significantly a song of love to a country of contradictions, battered, war-torn, divided, misguided and miraculous: an Italy where life is costume and the performance of art, and where circuses spring up on wasteland. The Italy that produced both Mussolini and Fellini, fascists and futurists and communists; where “beauty is always imperilled” and “genius grows like a weed”.
• Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated by Frank Wynne, is published by Atlantic (£14.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
