The long and the short: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn & The House on the Hill

The long and the short of it, in 1940s novels from Brooklyn and Piedmont, Italy.

The long was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which took several weeks to read, in the insomniac hours. Reading a 1940s bestseller takes the place of sleep. The growing tree, mentioned at judicious intervals, is ailanthus or tree of heaven; enough said. 

The short is The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese, which I'm halfway through in a day. The house on the hill is outside Turin in 1943, wartime; enough said. I have read other Pavese and recognise these houses, these hills, these women, his ghosts; perpetual edginess that the war confirms.

This is an ungainly tango. Forget blind Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman; Betty Smith and Cesare Pavese are more serendipitous, less felicitous. I can read a bestseller from 1944 and not a bestseller from 2025 (sauf a Graham Norton novel a couple of years ago; special pleading there). I like slim Italian literature from the 1940s and 1950s, much of it written by depressives. With a fascist state in your history, you're barely able to look ahead.

Now that the land is bare, I've resumed my wanderings; I go up and down the hillside and think of the long illusion that gave rise to this story of my life.