Francesco Biamonti and the Algerian war. Notes on an unfinished novel

Abstract

The Ligurian writer Francesco Biamonti (1928-2001) is best known for his five novels published by Einaudi between 1983 and 2003. This essay investigates the period preceding the writer’s publishing debut, i.e. the long literary ‘apprenticeship’ that saw Biamonti, between the late 1950s and the end of the 1970s, working on various projects, all of which were destined to remain unfinished, but nonetheless interesting for understanding the genesis of themes and images characteristic of the novels of his maturity. More specifically, this study deals with the so-called ‘romanzo algerino’, an outline inspired by the events of the Algerian War, of which Biamonti composed several partial drafts. The different compositional phases of this draft, its links with other unfinished Biamonti works (Il testimone inumano and the Romanzo di Gregorio) and its possible literary ancestry are reconstructed here in the light of the manuscripts and typescripts conserved at the writer’s home-archive in San Biagio della Cima, in the Imperia province.