Books: Prize Heel

A HERO OF OUR TIME (211 pp.)—Vasco Pratolini—Prentice Hall ($3).

Sandrino Verges! was on the lookout for the ideal woman. For an angel-faced Italian youngster of 16, his tastes were rather special. “First she resists, and then she lets you gradually kill her, bit by bit . . . I want the feeling of having something that defends itself and that you slowly crush and crush and crush until the life’s crushed out of it.” In the next room to his, sharing the same grubby apartment house, Sandrino finds someone to his sadistic little heart’s desire.

Virginia is a lonely widow with a melony figure and a melon for a head. She is old enough to be Sandrino’s mother, and for a while she acts the part. Mornings, she shoos him off to his haberdasher job. Noons, she carts him his lunch topped with his favorite dessert, persimmons. When the weather turns nippy, she digs into her skimpy bank balance and buys him a coat. Then one day her jealous joshing about some unknown girl across the street gives Sandrino his cue—the poor woman is hopelessly in love with him.

After that, the swaggering little punk degrades Virginia, pushes her from bed to worse. He beats her brutally over trifles, sponges off her (“I’ll take everything you’ve got”), blackmails a woman friend who tries to help her.

Over all of Sandrino’s twisted personal behavior hovers a political fantasy: that Fascism will make a comeback in Italy. To hurry X-day along, he signs over Virginia’s remaining lire to some underworld sharpies. For a receipt they give him a bit of black cloth, purportedly from Mussolini’s death shirt, soon leave him holding the rag.

Sandrino has one eye on revenge and the other on the girl across the street when Virginia suddenly announces that she is pregnant. In a grisly finale, Sandrino impales her head on a pike fence till it becomes a slippery, lifeless pulp.

Italian Novelist Vasco Pratolini seems to have sworn by the hair on Ernest Hemingway’s chest to write a hard-boiled novel. A Hero of Our Time is obviously that. For long stretches it is also a sharp-eyed study of purblind passion. But Novelist Pratolini’s political moral is a little crosseyed. He sets out to prove that Fascist ideas make prize heels. What he actually proves is that prize heels make good Fascists.