Giovannino guareschi biography of michael

Guareschi
This journal will be home to essays, articles, reviews, reminiscences, and other thoughts on the life and work of 20th-C. writer and artist Giovannino Guareschi (aka Giovanni Guareschi) by a long-time fan of his books (or at least of the books that were released in English translation between 1950 and 1970). Guareschi, of course, is best remembered for his series of humorous stories about the on-going conflict between the Catholic priest and Communist mayor of a small village in Italy’s Po River Valley in the years just following the Second World War. Don Camillo, the big cleric with fists of steel and heart of gold, converses frequently (and colorfully) with the Lord, Who continually challenges him to take the higher path in his dealings with his Marxist adversary, Peppone. The feisty priest, alas, isn’t quite able to confine his methods to the purely spiritual … but neither is Peppone always able to toe his Party’s line. Thus, even as the two do battle for the allegiance of the local populace, they find themselves at times seeing disconcertingly eye-to-eye.

The stories’ universal message of the possibility of “man’s humanity to man” is conveyed with a disarming simplicity which has survived translation into almost all of the world’s languages (!), and in the over 60 years since their debut in Guareschi’s periodical Candido, the characters of Don Camillo and Peppone have become beloved icons. The Cold War that provided their original context has ended; however, on the plane of ideas, Guareschi’s two combatants continue to vigorously champion their respective worldviews.

But there was more to Guareschi than his most well-known creations. You may also be acquainted with the famously mustachio’d author via his satirical political cartoons, his charming accounts of middle-class family life in post-war Italy, his prison-camp memoir, or even his W

The ‘Small World’ of the Village in Two Thai Novels of the Cold War

28 Oct 2013 (Mon)

Dr Michael Montesano, Visiting Research Fellow, The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Abstract:

In the early Cold War, both Khuekrit Pramot and Wasit Detkunchon published novels set in single Thai villages—on the Central Plains in the former case and in the Northeast in the latter.  Each writer used his novel and its village setting to convey to an urban readership his own understanding of rural Thai society and its relationship to national politics.  Strikingly, neither man romanticized the Thai village as a site of community or solidarity.

Khuekrit’s Phai daeng (Red Bamboo) centers on the relationship of a would-be underground Communist organizer and a Buddhist abbot.  It owes much to the example of the Don Camillo stories of Giovannino Guareschi, which centered on a Catholic priest and a Communist mayor in the mondo piccolo (‘small world’) of a highly politicized northern Italian town. 

The chapters of Wasit’s Dong yen (Cool Jungle) detail Communist infiltration of a Northeastern Thai village and the Thai state’s response.  As an officer in the Special Branch of the Police Department, Wasit represented the contest with Communist subversion in rural Thailand in ways that drew on approaches to counter-insurgency current in the Southeast Asia of the early 1960s.

As an exercise in modern Thai intellectual history, this talk traces the histories of Phai daeng and Dong yen, the ideas that informed them and the legacies of those ideas in Thai society and politics from the end of the Cold War to the present.  Those legacies have included the adoption of approaches drawn from counter-insurgency to assert the traditionally communal nature of the Thai village and the politicization of rural Thailand in a way that has made it seem more and more like Guareschi’s Po Valley.

Italian journalist, cartoonist, and humorist (1908–1968)

Giovannino Oliviero Giuseppe Guareschi (Italian:[dʒovanˈniːnoɡwaˈreski]; 1 May 1908 – 22 July 1968) was an Italian journalist, cartoonist, and humorist whose best known creation is the priest Don Camillo.

Life and career

Guareschi was born into a middle-class family in Fontanelle di Roccabianca, in the province of Parma, in 1908. He always joked about the fact that he, a big man, was baptized Giovannino, a name meaning "little John" or "Johnny". In 1926, his family went bankrupt and he could not continue his studies at the University of Parma. After working at various minor jobs, he started to write for a local newspaper, the Gazzetta di Parma. In 1929, he became editor of the satirical magazine Corriere Emiliano, and from 1936 to 1943 was the chief editor of a similar magazine called Bertoldo.

In 1943, Guareschi was drafted into the army, which apparently helped him to avoid trouble with the Italian Fascist authorities. He ended up as an artillery officer. When Italy signed the armistice of Cassibile with the Allies in 1943, he was arrested as an Italian military internee and imprisoned with other Italian soldiers in camps in German-occupied Poland for almost two years, including at Stalag X-B near Sandbostel. He later wrote about this period in Diario Clandestino (My Secret Diary).

After the war, Guareschi returned to Italy and in 1945 founded a monarchist weekly satirical magazine, Candido. After Italy became a republic, he supported the Christian Democracy party. He criticized and satirized the Italian Communist Party in his magazine, famously drawing a Communist as a man with an extra nostril, and coining a slogan that became very popular: "Inside the voting booth God can see you, Stalin can't." When the Communists were defeated in the 1948 Italian general election, Guareschi did no

Italian Bookshelf 623 Alan R. Perry. The Don Camillo Stories of Giovannino Guareschi: A Humorist Portrays the Sacred. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Pp. 240. “Like Jesus of Nazareth, Guareschi wrote stories” (186): such is the guiding principle of Alan R. Perry‘s study of the “sacred” in the “Mondo Piccolo” (or Don Camillo) stories of Giovannino Guareschi (the author was Christened with the diminutive), the first monograph in English on “Italy‘s pre-eminent Catholic storyteller” (25). The Mondo Piccolo stories of Guareschi (1908-1968) remain amazingly popular, having been translated into many languages, and adapted on film and radio, but their popularity seems to represent a problem for the academy. Guareschi, a journalist, editor, and cartoonist, as well as a writer of fiction, cannot be said to have been a marginal figure; but in terms of the literary mainstream, his monarchism, distrust of modernity, militant Catholicism, strident anti-Communism and avowed anti-intellectualism, as well as the brute fact of his popularity, means that he has remained substantially ignored within the scholarly sphere even as he has found a vast reading public outside it. As Perry points out, it is only with the advent of cultural studies as a challenge to the traditional literary canon and teaching syllabus in Italian Studies that his work has come to be reconsidered, or at least taught. 624 Annali d’Italianistica 28 (2010) The first of the Mondo Piccolo stories was written in December 1946 and what was to become a series of nearly 350 stories met with immediate success, for reasons we may speculate about. With the last of the stories published in 1966, these are quintessential Cold War documents: short, repetitive tales in a syntactically simple and lexically restricted Italian, which stage, in miniature, Italy and the wider world‘s pol