The world at large marvels and revels in the handsome Antonio’s weakness. Trapped in a mesh of conflicting voices, one or two supportive, most full of contempt, Antonio falls into a defeatist mutism. He is now, as it were, aggressively passive; he spends all day in bed, he will not communicate.

To get a sense of how far Brancati goes beyond a mere condemnation of Fascism or Catholicism here, it’s worth remembering another writer from the Catania area, Giovanni Verga. Born in 1840, Verga started his career as a writer of elegant society novels, but made his breakthrough in the late 1870s when, living in Milan, he turned to writing about the peasants in the backward part of Sicily where he had grown up. This was a time when the middle-class readers of the major European cities had begun to feel that acute nostalgia for the tight-knit communities of the rural past which is still with us today. Verga recreated those communities for his sophisticated public, but in a wonderful stroke of therapeutic irony he showed how, far from being havens of mutual support, there was actually nothing crueller than the traditional peasant community, particularly when, for some reason, an individual broke society’s rules or failed in some way to fit in. And although to the reader the chorus of pious rhetoric deployed by the community to destroy the unmarried mother, or the girl who cannot afford to stay at home and nurse a dying parent, is evidently hypocritical, the victim inevitably succumbs to that rhetoric and considers him or herself a guilty failure. There is no question in Verga of anyone reaching an independent position outside the chorus of hypocrisy. Everyone is at the whim of the cruel collective ethos.

Likewise Antonio. Even when his reason can calmly dismiss an idea as absurd, his mind nevertheless remains prey to every stray voice and even begins to invent those voices when they are not actually heard. Invited to take part in an anti-fascist meeting he finds himself equating political protest with failure and failure with sexual impotence. “They are always talking about philosophy and liberty because they can’t get a hard on,” he thinks. Even though the private lives of one or two of the men present remind him that this is not actually the case, he nevertheless feels the men are, as he puts it, “stained with purity.”

This use of oxymoron alerts us to a general tendency in Brancati’s work to stand traditional wisdom on its head. Antonio’s mother protests to her confessor that the church is punishing her son for having behaved with Barbara in the very same way that Joseph behaved with Mary. Was the Virgin’s marriage null? In perhaps the key passage in the book, Antonio and his uncle go together into an empty church. Despite the fact that nobody is there, Antonio feels the pressure of the institution’s judgement of him, as if every painting and statue stared at him with disapproval. His sympathetic uncle, the only man who takes time to understand Antonio, is dying and so disillusioned with Fascism, with life, that he is indeed eager to die. In an extraordinary passage, he struggles to pray, but reaches the frightening conclusion that the idea of Christ is as empty of content as it is beautiful, and salvation merely a dream. If Christ is the church’s spouse, he hasn’t delivered, and we erstwhile believers are “disappointed lovers.” In short, Christ too is impotent.

So what exactly is wrong with Antonio? Brancati’s cleverness is to give us just one long statement from the sufferer himself. Hard pressed by his uncle, Antonio at last tells his story. But if, after all the book’s hints of possible links between the moral ugliness of the time and Antonio’s problems, we expected some cerebral, lucid assessment of his malaise, we will be surprised. Antonio tells a long, detailed, moving story of his dealings with women. It serves to dismiss any question that Brancati is using his predicament merely as a metaphor for a certain kind of personality disorder under Fascism. In particular, the extent to which, as a handsome man, Antonio has always felt himself to be a prey to female passion, to a disturbing voraciousness behind the rhetoric of romance and modesty, again suggests a layer of interpretation that goes beyond a comment on the contemporary situation.

Where does this leave the political and social readings of the story? It’s curious that three other great Italian novels on the Fascist era make the same link between the difficulty in engaging in sexual relationships and the difficulty of becoming involved in action in general. In Cesare Pavese’s The House on the Hill (1949), the hero is fascinated by a group of anti-fascist partisans, but is somehow unable to believe in their mission and cannot join them. As a result, an ex-girlfriend among the partisans, mother of a child that may be his, refuses to renew their relationship, sees him as irrelevant, outside reality.

In Giorgio Bassani’s masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), the Jewish family’s withdrawal from the realities of Fascist Italy into the haven of their garden is accompanied by a failure of the young people in the book to achieve any sexual initiation. In Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe (1940), the hero’s long and fruitless wait for military engagement and glory is paralleled by a failure to marry or be involved with women in any way.

All these books are wonderfully different. Yet beneath them all lies a deep apprehension, in reaction perhaps to the very sensual and conflictual nature of Italian life, that any engagement with the world, sexual or political, is of its very nature ugly, demeaning. Hence the heroes of these books become strangely Peter Pan figures, yearning for virility and aggression, but excluded from events by their very sensibility.

Brancati himself was in Sicily when the Allies invaded the island in July 1943 and it is in the aftermath of that invasion and the devastation it brought that The Beautiful Antonio ends. Antonio has finally discovered the capacity to express his anger physically.