Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 9. May 21 1968

Aftermath Of Turmoil

Aftermath Of Turmoil.

"If—as a young friend of mine would state, who must have been just born when all this happened—it did not sound like 'crap', I would say that on that day I died. I died with them, because they were the Italy I knew, the only possible Italy that could exist."

Amato the author and Amato the man probably never covered from the turmoil of his adolescence. The latter was left bitter and uncertain, the former too coldly objective, soon to dry up altogether.

And then, closer to home, there are the savagely objective "One of the Titans" and "The New, New ...".

Here is a scathing indictment of the pedestalled average Kiwi, so self consciously studied in New Zealand writing, by an Italian of sensitivity thrown into the mill of construction work in the central North Island, among New Zealanders who had fought the "Wops" and the "Eye-ties" in the Second World War and now treated them accordingly. When in "The New, New . . ." the new immigrant is confronted in the street by a hostile New Zealander Amato's thoughts are almost morbidly sarcastic; "And he understood also how his accent, his odd way of saying words, must sound disagreeable to the musical ears of these nice folks, of this nice man who had stopped him in the street with an obvious desire to be friendly and helpful."