“Listen to me and I will tell you a story about the days when there was poverty in San Ginese and we used to go to America to work and make our fortune. I will try to tell it well, with the skilful use of words and some feeling from my heart.” So begins Ugo, and can’t you just hear his voice? Perhaps a little croaky, or raspy, especially when he gets emotional, and you just know it’s going to be something worth listening to.

The Fireflies of Autumn and Other Tales of San Ginese is a collection of short stories by Tuscan-born Australian translator and author, Moreno Giovannoni. Ugo emigrated from San Ginese to Australia in 1957. Where he ended up, he had no extended family around him, and he wondered, when he aged, what would happen to the stories, the Villora folklore, that he grew up with.

They were stories told and retold: in the tavern over sweet coffee laced with rum and garnished with a slice of lemon peel; in the courtyard on summer nights; in the bomb shelter as the whole town waited for it to be over; in the enchanted glade by the babbling brook during the town’s wartime mass exodus.

In his head, he had countless anecdotes about all the quirky characters in the village of Villora, often describing how they got their nickname, or what the effect of their particular eccentricity might be. It’s not a big community: just one hundred and twenty people, so by the end of these tales, you’re familiar with quite a lot of them.

And what a quirky lot they were: imbeciles, a murderer, an adulteress, a thumb-sucker, saintly sisters, promiscuous wives, charitable men, virtuous aunts, lazy priests, a farmer with a strange crop, a wife with a singular appetite; many of them were members of the author’s extended family; truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up!

Ugo’s is a genuine voice, telling tales of resistance and retribution, tales filled with superstition and sensible observations, tales that are sad and funny and sobering. He describes a hard life, a basic life, where any luxuries were sparse and simple. And yet, these tales are so rich in colour, you can taste the pecorino, smell the manure, blink at the dazzling sun in the clear blue sky.

We know that depression in all its incarnations, including post-natal depression, have existed for a long time, they just had different names: back then in Villora, people felt the brush of the wings of the Angel of Sadness.

Giovanonni treats the reader to some superb descriptive prose: “…in the mornings the mist rose out of the dry swamp and floated away into the sky. In the evenings it rolled down from the hills and crawled into the empty spaces between the trees, lay gently on the fields, rolled over onto its back, turning to one side and then the other, holding the entire plain in its ghostly embrace until the world to the east, this side of Porcari, was a dirty grey translucent smudge and the only sign of hope was the sickly pale-yellow halo of the electric light at Baracca tavern…”

All this is contained within a wonderfully evocative cover by Mary Callahan, includes a delightful map by Greg Ure, and has a very handy Dramatis Personae to help keep all those similar names clear in the brain. “It is worth remarking that if these tales had not been written, the people in them and the events that befell them would have faded into boundless oblivion.” For how many other villages in how many other lands would this be true? A marvellous read.
This unbiased review from a copy provided by Black Inc.