Pity Piety Mercy Antonio Galetta Review

Pity Piety Mercy Antonio Galetta BookBlast Review

Pity Piety Mercy, the debut novel by young writer Antonio Galetta, comes highly recommended from Italy, where it has won the Premio Campiello Opera Prima and was a finalist for the Premio Italo Calvino. Out in English on 6 October, translated by Antonella Lettieri and published by Foundry Editions, Pity Piety Mercy is set in an unnamed town in southern Italy, referred to only as “our small town”. The novel follows a local election that is held after a scandal sinks the town’s mayor.

Stepping up to fill the power vacuum are three parties: the safe bet ‘Reformed Branch of the National Party’, the ‘Kitchen Sink’ (an ‘unlikely emulsion’ made up of members of the majority and opposition parties in the current council) and ‘Home Sweet Home’, a new proposition by a young start-up entrepreneur. Home Sweet Home’s mission is to combat the factors which make the town’s promising young people flee to northern cities or out of Italy altogether instead of settling down at home in what one of the characters refers to as ‘the arse end of nowhere’.

Fillers, Lemons, Chisels and Bandoliers

What ensues is a scramble in which each party rushes to recruit candidates and secure votes by any means necessary. In the Home Sweet Home campaign, ‘ghost candidates’ are used to pull in more votes, carefully arranged by their usefulness: ‘fillers’, at the bottom of the pile, will bring in ten votes at the most, while at the top the highly sought-after ‘bandoliers’, who hold the real power in the town, can make or break a campaign by allying themselves with it. Corruption, which took down the previous mayor, is also rife among the newly coalescing parties. In an insurance office, a complex scheme involving car-breakers and expired license plates is used to garner votes, while a local landlord allows rent extensions to residents who vote for his party. Candidates leverage whatever power they have to gain more votes for their party:

Our promises range from moving someone’s child into our secondary school’s most prestigious class to demonstrating once again that our general town plan is actually quite fragile and can easily be ripped up – how many swimming pools, how many loft extensions have we approved in this war!

As tensions rise, anonymous smear campaigns emerge in the form of leaflets left around the town, with accusations ranging from ‘diminutive (a little agreement, a little cocaine habit)’ to ‘truly serious’ allegations such as money laundering and paedophilia. Beneath the surface, this seemingly minor election is a fight to the death in which no holds are barred.

Against Riace

An additional party emerges partway through the novel. A local firebrand referred to as ‘the woman who will betray us’ has been giving anti-immigrant speeches to interested audiences from a garage, and – after being courted to stand as a Reformed Branch candidate – decides instead, as her name implies, to run for mayor herself as the founder of a new party. Based on vicious racist and anti-migrant sentiment (‘The fucking blacks are dogs and swine, and so they should go back to whatever shithole country they came from!’), the party is christened ‘Contra Riace’ in the original Italian, as a reaction against a real southern Italian town that became known for welcoming a record number of migrants in a bid to revitalise its collapsing population. Although the majority of the migrants who settled in Riace have now moved on, the consequences have been long-lasting, as a 2024 Politico article explains: the scheme deepened divisions between pro- and anti-migrant residents, provoked a backlash as political power in Italy shifted to the right, and saw the mayor responsible for the migrant programme charged with embezzlement and facilitating illegal migration (these charges have since been dropped).

A 2019 PBS news segment explaining the Italian populist surge that contributed to the end of Riace’s migration programme.

In Antonella Lettieri’s English translation, the anti-immigrant party’s name is instead rendered as ‘No Small Boats’, a more familiar reference for English readers. In an interview with Foundry’s publisher, Richard Village, at the end of the book, Lettieri explains that the ‘liberties’ she has taken with the Italian are intended to introduce ‘a wider scope, a global point of view’ to this satire which, as Lettieri says, is relevant not only to Italy but to ‘any other country that is currently struggling to find a way to resist the rising wave of populism’. As well as borrowing Donald Trump’s ‘shithole Countries,’ ‘the woman who will betray us’ also references Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, telling her listeners that a wave of migrants would leave the town’s streets ‘foaming with blood’.

Us and Them

The tension between individual and party, between one small town and the world, is most striking in Galetta’s use of language. The novel is written from the perspective of an almost-omniscient narrator who is aware of all the goings-on in the town, from the machinations of each party to the psychological states of each character. However, the individuality of these characters and of the small town they live in is brought into question by a complete lack of names. Characters are either referred to either in their relation to a party or to other characters (‘ the leader of the Kitchen Sink’, ‘the founder of Home Sweet Home’, ‘the bandolier’s daughter’, ‘the insurance woman), or simply as ‘one of them’ or ‘one of us’.

The exact boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are never made clear and presumably shift along with the balance of power in the town. The author also uses the recurring metaphor of a flock of starlings: they can be seen as one unit from afar, their murmuration shifting and changing as allegiances transform and each party coalesces, but up close they are a mass of chaotic individuals, ‘ruthlessness, carrion breath, shitstorm’. It is only in the last section, as the final debate is about to start, that the characters are named, their party loyalties giving way to their individuality.

A BBC Earth video on the ‘superswarms’ of starlings over Rome

This same tension is also at work in other wordings we would usually take for granted. The priest blesses a parishioner ‘on behalf of the Parent, the Child, and their immaterial, consubstantial and omnipresent Third Form’. Spotify plays a song that is presumably Beyoncé’s ‘Run The World (Girls)’, but its lyrics are quoted as ‘Who’s in charge of this ball of molten rock careening through space? Young female humans.’

The result is a story that is both hyperlocal and oddly non-specific. The election is taking place in a small town in southern Italy, but it could also be taking place anywhere else, the events of the characters’ lives happening to anyone else in the same position. And yet, the author seems to say when he refers to toast as ‘bread browned on both sides through exposure to a radiant heat source’, we should also be reading with a critical eye, recalibrating our ideas of what is normal and acceptable and what is strange and ridiculous.

Climate and Denial

In contrast to the migrant crisis, which is the subject of hot debate among the candidates, there is another global crisis which is entirely ignored by every party: climate change and climate destruction. The run-up to the elections takes place in ‘a March that feels like July’, which seems to worry nobody even as the grass browns. The daughter of one of the party leaders has proven, through research undertaken as part of her degree, that the nearby steelworks are poisoning the land and its people, but her father is unconcerned. The native olive groves are dying off due to a bacterial infection, but they are only brought up in debate when the strain of bacteria is compared to immigrants.

Instead, the town remains stubbornly insular on these topics, preferring to focus on the local elections themselves:

The thing is, we’re no idiots: we know perfectly well that, now more than ever, our town should be described as a provisional agglomeration of concrete and tarmac over meadows and hills – an inhabited, polluted agglomeration … But it’s sweeter to focus on the fact that here, against the picturesque backdrop of our thousand-year-old town (the whitewash, the porous limestone, the green vistas, and the little flowers blooming all at the same time in every season), there still exists, stronger than ever, the Kitchen Sink’s salvific cynicism, in opposition to the Reformed Branch’s reassuring marketing, while the fascination and horror that go with No Small Boats are feebly besieged by Home Sweet Home’s obsession with the future.

The climactic chapter of the novel, in which the final debate before the elections takes place, is the clearest example. As the party leaders line up on stage, a wildfire rages just outside the town’s borders, ignored by all those running for election. They are only concerned that it might interrupt the proceedings. In this case, the parallels between the small town and the world as a whole are only too clear: as we focus on infighting, repelling outsiders and protecting our own interests, crisis is fast approaching.

Foundry Editions

Pity Piety Mercy is the latest in a string of intriguing novels to be published by young independent press Foundry Editions, which focuses on writers from around the Mediterranean. Their cover design focuses on patterns showcasing ‘the visual heritage of the Mediterranean’, as seen here in a photograph taken at Veranda Books, an independent London bookshop specialising in translated literature.

Over the past year, BookBlast has featured in-depth reviews of Karim Kattan’s Eden at Dawn, Michele Masneri’s Paradiso, Anna Pazos’s Killing the Nerve and Rosa Ribas’s Far. In their Monthly Top 5 Picks from around the world, BookBlast has showcased Ryan Falzon’s You Know the Sun Bothers Me and Eve Guerra’s Repatriation, as well as hosting lively discussions about Karim Kattan’s The Palace on the Higher Hill and Rosa Ribas’ Far at their Book Club. For anyone interested in books in translation, Foundry Editions is definitely a press to watch.