The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre

Italian fiction

Original title – Il Duca

Translator – Antonella Lettieri

Source – Subscription book

When the Booker longlist came out, I was pleased to see this on it, as I have been a fan of Foundry Press since it first appeared a couple of years ago and have a subscription with them, so I had this book on my TBR.  Matteo Mmelchiorre is a director of the library and museum Cstelfranco Vento, which is where the book is set in Northern Italy.  He studies the Middle Ages. He has also written about the region’s mountains and forests.  It is good to see how this book has been inspired by the world he lives in and the history he is interested in.

There were perhaps ten crows. Clattering. Cawing. Careening. Blind with fury. They were whirling in a frantic fray, striking each other again and again. Then, all of a sudden, they scattered, darting in opposite directions and, in the newly cleared sky, only a knot of wings remained, an entangled tussle which twisted and swirled and eventu-ally, as if struck by shot, plummeted through the air.

But as soon as the tangle hit the ground, right in the courtyard of the house, I discerned a buzzard instead: open beak, frightful eyes, low wings. The buzzard was pinning a young black crow to the ground, trapping it with its talons, and the crow was flapping its wings, and twisting its head, and wriggling, searching for some prospect of salvation.

The opening of the book and the Buzzard and Crow

The book, he said in the Booker interview, had many inspirations, but the fight he saw between a crow and a buzzard was one of them. I have seen a similar thing in the peaks near her birds of prey, where crows have tackled them. Maybe the scene itself is in part of the book, the buzzard, a solitary bird, a regal bird, and the crow live in groups, a common bird scavening its way. The book follows the duke, who is actually a count, a man stuck in his villa like his family has been for centuries.  What happens when he finds the big man from the village is taking his timber?  That is the kernel of the book, like the birds’ two classes coming together, and it is about the duke, an odd man, quirky solo figure, the last of a line of his family, in a way, maybe a sign of years of inbreeding, then the community around him suffers due to him having the land.  Then there are little pieces about the nature and the natural world they are in. This is the old feudal world of the past, and a village wanting to move into the modern world.

So, by calling me The Duke, the villagers were either implying that I was as eccentric as my grandfather, though inevitably of a quite different sort of eccentricity, or they were mocking the decline of my lineage. A decline which, after all, was most evident, and by virtue of which they could finally enjoy the sight of a Cimamonte with no servants and no tenants and with scratched-up hands and hardened nails.

In any case, I did not care what the village said or thought about me. I was certain that I was already living out the best fate I could possibly desire. Nothing important ever happened during the course my days. Nothing complex ever perplexed my gaze. No exception to my routine. No decision blocking my way. I lived in the best condition to which a man of my nature could aspire – the perfect, ideal condition.

But now, on an afternoon like any other, Nelso Tabióna had come to rap on my windowpane to tell me that, up in the Mountain, in my woods, I had been had.

The duke is actually a count aqqnd the nature is here in the passage I picked

For me, this is a clever book; if it had an NYRB cover, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a rediscovered classic, given the scope and twists of the story. But for me, the one book I thought of a lot was actually Gormenghast. Both books are set in remote settings, and both deal with a crumbling royal family. Both tackle modern subjects, but also set the books in an unknown time frame. Nature is big in both as well. I think I may be the only person who thinks this. There is a mention of ECO in reviews and 19th-century classics. The Foundry, in a recent Instagram post, pointed readers to Trollope and Hardy, whom the writer said inspired him. Of course, The Leopard is another book that has been mentioned as it also deals with a family line crumbling. The writer has also mentioned another Italian book, Deliver us by Luigi Meneghelli, as his bible while writing this book, a book set in a village that explores the writer’s relationship with the land.  This is maybe the most unusual book on the longlist. It is a modern book that reads like a classic novel, with some contemporary ideas about nature and society. It took the translator a while to get the duke’s voice right, she said, as it is very hard to capture the exact Italian nature of his voice. Have you read this book?