Reading in Italian

The first book I read in Italian was 'Il giorno della civetta, " by Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia. I chose it because it was a slim 120 pages and was about the Sicilian mafia. I don't think I understood much. I' d only been in Italy a year. Likewise, my first cinema experience in Italian, at roughly the same time, 'The Sixth Sense,' an American film, as I correctly surmised the dialogue wouldn't be as logorrheic as an Italian one.

Learning a foreign language is fundamental when moving and settling down in a foreign country. While I have met some people who resolutely refuse to adopt the language of their new country, I wouldn't recommend doing so. It took me three years to be fluent and comfortable speaking Italian. I understood it far earlier. Acquiring a TV, and leaving it on as background noise whilst I cooked and tidied my very small apartment helped. And so did reading. 
I quickly realised as I read that pausing to look up words in continuation,wouldn't work. It halted the flow and it made reading irritating. So despite often not understanding much I would persevere, I would try to figure it out from context. I remember from the second book I read in Italian "Se il sole muore" by the Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, the same unusual and incomprehensible word kept coming up so often that once I reached the end of my alloted number of pages for the day, I looked it up. In those early reading days I started with a target of 10 pages a day, if I was gripped by the story, I would continue. Nowadays I read as many pages as I feel like.

One big frustration was the speed at which I read. Ten pages seemed to go on for ever and ever and ever. Getting used to convoluted structures could be a headache too, as well as the long sentences, though to be fair, rarely Proustian in length. French and Italian writing excels in going on for a long time without actually saying very much or having much of a point. Undoubtedly for natives there must be some kind of beauty in this style of prose but for newcomers to the language wading through paragraph after paragraph and chapter after chapter to get no where and say not very much can get irritating and frustrating.

However there have been some memorable books in Italian: Alessandro Baricco's Novecento, a monologue; Stefano Benni's Il Bar sotto il Mare; Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'Ragazzi di Vita'... This last was made all the more memorable by discovering that I lived 500metres up the hill from where the characters in the book, based on real people, had lived. Pasolini himself had lived in Monteverde on Via Fonteiana before his violent death on the Lungomare in Ostia.

Then came the first un-put-downable book, Fabio Volo's Il Giorno in più, which I made the mistake of telling an Italian friend of mine I had read. She sneered. Volo was hardly a serious writer. Maybe not. He was at the time an ex-MTV VJ and aspiring actor. He may still in those days have had a show on TV. These were definitely not the credentials of a serious writer. But what he wrote was engaging and flowed. He wrote about people, his books were set in Milan, and he wrote about relationships. I read a few more of his books until I noticed a pattern emerging.
Reading 'La Solitudine dei Numeri Primi' by Paolo Giordano, his first book, a prize winner, gave me more kudos. The subsequent film was a bit of a let down. Umberto Eco in the original made me feel great until I was told that the book I'd read 'La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana' wasn't his most complicated so not that big an achievement. It probably wasn't. I had abandoned Foucault's Pendulum which I tried to read in English translation. I hadn't got past the first chapter! 

Over the years, I've become less systematic and more relaxed about reading in Italian. Nowadays, it's more a case of if I feel like it. And inevitably I tend to read in English because even after 20 years in Italy it's easier and faster. 
Having said that, this summer I finished Elena Ferrante's magnificent quadrilogy which starts with 'My Brilliant Friend' and concludes with 'The Story of the Lost Child'. It has taken me four years, a book a year. But the sense of achievement isthere. I'd never even considered reading it in translation!

As for that very first book, 'Il giorno della Civetta' I read it again a few years later and discovered a different story. And then again in 2014, when I uncovered new details that I'd failed to pick up on in the previous two readings. That, of course, is one of the pleasures of unveiling a book in a foreign language, the words that escaped me in a first reading. the gaps I'd stabbed a guess at, the passages of opaque grammar and wordiness suddenly flow smooth as a river with still the occasional rock which means I can read that book again and again with a renewed sense of discovery.