In Love and War: A Letter to My Parents - Softcover

Corelli, Maria; Goodwin, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1904095089 ISBN 13: 9781904095088

Publisher: Short Books, 2001

Synopsis

"This is the most difficult letter I have ever written because I have to tell you something very serious and perhaps you will say terrible and sad. I ask you if possible not to judge me until we have been able to see each other and talk about it...". In a letter to her parents, written in Rome in the summer of 1944, Maria Corelli tells of her life on the run in Italy during the Second World War. As the Germans approach, she and her husband risk their lives to follow their friend, a Jewish musician, into hiding in the mountains...only to find their own relationship broken apart.

About this title

Review

At a cursory glance it is easy to mistake Maria Corelli's In Love and War for a spin-off from Louis de Bernières' Captain Corelli's Mandolin. A quote from de Bernières extolling the virtues of the book dominates a cover that is, shall we say, Corelli-esque. What lurks behind the jacket is however, something quite different. In Love and War is a copy of an actual letter Maria Corelli (or Mary Leslie, as she was then) wrote from Rome to her parents in Sussex during the summer of 1944. It was her first letter home in almost four years and, as it emerges, she had more than a few things to tell them.

When the Second World War began Maria and her husband Lewis were studying music in Rome. It was here that they had met and befriended the talented Jewish-Romanian singer Sigbert Steinfeld. Italy entered the war in 1940 and Steinfeld was promptly sent to a concentration camp in Calabria, while Maria and Lewis, who narrowly avoided being interred themselves, struggled to find work, decent lodgings and food in a city increasingly suspicious of foreigners. The three were eventually reunited in Piscinisco two years later but were soon forced into hiding when the Germans invaded. It was while camped in "a shallow hollow in the rocks high up in the mountains" that Maria and Sigbert fell madly in love. Incredibly Lewis, afraid that his appearance might compromise their safety, suggested that the pair made their own way to Rome posing as an Italian couple. In Rome they were to find that friends of this calibre were slightly thinner on the ground. The prose is decidedly clunky, but the rough quality of the language does not diminish Corelli's powerful document, if anything it enhances it. Her unadorned and clearly un-amended account of a love affair flourishing amidst the chaos of war-torn Italy is disarmingly candid, and for that reason very moving. Less impressive is an appendix of entries from her dream journals of the period. Budding psychoanalysts might enjoy them but it's hard to see how they illuminate the letter that precedes them.--Travis Elborough

.

About this edition

• Publisher: Short Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1904095089
• ISBN 13: 9781904095088
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144