In 1941, a German soldier is wander

In 1941, a German soldier is wandering around the San Lorenzo district of Rome. He has grown up in the German town of Dachau, which, as we all know, "was to become famous for the camp on its outskirts devoted 'to labor and biological experiments.'"

The soldier, Gunther, comes upon the shy schoolteacher, Ida Mancuso, follows her upstairs to her humble apartment, falls upon her, and rapes her --- which causes her to pass out. He leaves, and, three days later, his convoy is bombed. And, "he was among the dead."

This is the story of Ida, and Useppe --- her son, the result of this unlikely union --- along with her first child Nino. It also includes one of Nino's friends, Davide, and (if you will believe it) Nino's dog, Bella. It all takes place between 1941 and 1947, starting at the beginning of World War II, including the Allied invasion of Italy, the taking over of Italy in 1943 by the Germans and their ultimate defeat, and concluding with the return of peace to Italy.

History: A Story is almost 750 pages long, and I am hard put to compare it to any novel I have ever come across. Perhaps we could say that it's not far from the USA Trilogy --- largely because Morante is intent on tying history, and the history of WWII, and the history of the world, to her characters. This means that we get to see, first hand, the effect of those desperate years on body and soul. History, and circumstance become meshed with Ida's fears and struggle: the effect of war on psyches --- bombings, deportations, deprivation, daily patrols of police and the military and later, the SS and, specifically, Ida's daily terror (she's half-Jewish).

USA, possibly --- but there is a touch of War and Peace. We are in the middle of great historical happenings: Rome under siege, there's a back and forth of the military --- the Americans to the south, the Germans to the north. There's the Italian resistance, governmental terrorism. There are the loss of homes and jobs and lives to bombers, the isolation of Jews, the effect of hunger on the very young. It is as if Tolstoi's great novel were focused on the effect of towering historical events on the poor and the powerless and the dispossessed --- people enmeshed in an historical progression over which they have no control.