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54 Hardcover – 5 May 2005
- Print length550 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWilliam Heinemann Ltd
- Publication date5 May 2005
- Dimensions16.26 x 4.37 x 24.59 cm
- ISBN-100434012939
- ISBN-13978-0434012930
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ITALIAN SOLDIERS!
The Slovenian people have launched an inexorable struggle against the occupying forces. Many of your comrades have already fallen in that struggle. And you will go on falling day after day, night after night, for as long as you remain tools in the hands of our oppressors, and until Slovenia is liberated.
Your leaders will lead you to believe that the Slovenian people love you, that you are being attacked only by 'tiny numbers of communists'. This is an insolent lie. All Slovenes are in accord with the struggle against the occupying forces. Under the leadership of the Slovenian National Liberation Committee, our entire people has organised itself into a single invincible liberation front.
ITALIAN SOLDIERS!
Your superiors are concealing from you the desperate situation into which Mussolini has hurled the 'Italian Empire' by selling it to Hitler. They are hiding from you the fact that Abyssinia, for which Mussolini spilled so much Italian blood, is no longer in Italian hands. They are hiding from you the impasse that Italian troops face in all of their African colonies. They are hiding from you the losses that Italian troops have suffered in the Balkans, and the fact that western Serbia, Montenegro, most of Bosnia and Hercegovina, Lika, and parts of Dalmatia have already been liberated. They are hiding from you the terrible losses and torments inflicted upon Italian troops by the crushing weight of Russian weapons on the Russian front, and by the unbearable Russian winter. They are hiding from you the chaos that is breaking out in Italian cities as a result of the growing food shortages, the result of continuous bombing by the British Air Force, and the growing discontent of the!
Italian people with the policies of the warmonger Mussolini, who is plunging Italy into the abyss.
ITALIAN SOLDIERS!
Understand what the Italian populace at home is coming to understand more and more, that Hitler is pushing you on all fronts: in Africa, in the Balkans, in France and in the USSR, so that you will be unable to form a resistance in your own country when he attacks 'Allied' Italy, just as he has attacked 'Allied Yugoslavia'. Understand what any blind man must understand today, that Italy, as long as it gives allegiance to Germany, will suffer a terrible defeat at sea, on land and in the skies, at the hands of the united forces of Russia, Great Britain and all the freedom-loving peoples of the world.
Understand, Italian soldiers, that the only way out for you and for the whole of the Italian people is to turn your weapons against those who have brought both you and us nothing but misfortune, to turn them against Mussolini's fascist gang! It is vain to claim that you too condemn the bestiality of Hitler and Mussolini, that you too wish to see the end of fascism and the end of the war. You must use your actions to demonstrate your love of freedom and peace, your hatred of the oppressors, both yours and ours. Otherwise what awaits you is ruin, both yours and theirs.
ITALIAN SOLDIERS!
The Communist Party of Slovenia appeals to you:
Do not carry out your superiors' orders, do not fire on the Slovenians, do not persecute the partisans, but surrender to them, do not stand in the way of our liberation struggle!
Attack and disarm the fascist militia, the agents of OVRA and all those who are forcing you to fight against the Slovenian people.
Destroy the Italian armed forces, destroy the stores of weapons and food unless you can give them to the partisans, destroy the means of transport of the Italian army, lorries, motorcycles, horses, roads, railways, etc.!
Do not let the Italian armies be posted to the Russian front, to die for the lunatic Hitler and his satellites! Demand to return to your homeland!
Desert the Italian army, our people will be glad to help you! Give your weapons and ammunition to the partisans and the Popular Defence.
Join the Slovenian partisan units and help them, guns in hand, to bring to an early conclusion the absurd butchery of war, so that you can very soon return to your homes, to your poor abandoned mothers, wives and children, and establish a true sovereignty of the people in your own homeland.
long live the common struggle of all peoples against fascist barbarism!
long live the ussr and its invincible red army, the most powerful defender of freedom and progress!
long live stalin, the leader of the people and workers in all countries!
long live the communist party of yugoslavia!
death to fascism - freedom to the people!
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovenia
Someone had written 'SMRT FA?SISMU' in red paint on the peeling wall.
The men had been lined up in front of it.
Their faces were blank. Closed, absent. Like the windows of the village.
The captain yelled orders at the unit. The Italian soldiers assumed their positions, rifles shouldered. Almost all of them reservists. The officer was the youngest, with a well-trimmed moustache and a grey garrison cap tilted on his forehead.
The condemned men raised their eyes to look their butchers in the face. To be certain that they were men like themselves. They were used to death, even their own, they had grown accustomed to it over thousands of generations.
On the other side eyes lowered, reflected sensations.
The two rows of men faced one another, motionless, like statues abandoned in a field.
Product details
- Publisher : William Heinemann Ltd; First Edition (5 May 2005)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 550 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0434012939
- ISBN-13 : 978-0434012930
- Dimensions : 16.26 x 4.37 x 24.59 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 37,949 in Contemporary Fiction (Books)
- 40,951 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer reviews:
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 September 2017V good
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 January 2024The writers of the Wu Ming cooperative are usually rather boring, with an excessively ideological approach to history. This novel is THE shining exception. It tells the story of three communists from Bologna (Vittorio Capponi and his two sons): two of them are politically serious but frustratred by the events of 1954; the third one loves dancing, women and Cary Grant. The authors manage to have a well-balanced view of events, and it is difficult to put down the book
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 August 2006Cary Grant's assignment by MI6 to play the role of Yugoslav leader Marshall Tito in a film biography is just one of the plot lines in this jam-packed novel, filled with subplots from its 1954 setting. The west is trying to form closer ties with Tito, while the Soviets, with whom he has already broken, are acting to prevent this. Many Italian partisans fought on the Yugoslav front during World War II and have remained there, supported by friends and family in Bologna as they engage in the smuggling of oil into Trieste. As members of the local communist party, these Bolognese supporters are trying to control the future of "Italian" Trieste. In Naples, Salvatore Lucania ("Lucky Luciano"), recently deported from the US, works at controlling the world's drug trade.
As these plots develop simultaneously, the reader must keep track of dozens of characters and their activities, since the various plots do not overlap until the end. Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, David Niven, Grace Kelly, and the James Bond novels all play parts in Grant's story. The Naples story, with Luciano, involves all the on-going crimes of this don and his henchmen--drugs, race-fixing, gambling, prostitution. The Bologna plot is far more domestic, with a young man searching for his father, who is in Trieste, and a love story involving a married woman who takes care of her mentally ill brother. Minor threads involve the McCarthy hearings, Emperor Bao Dai from Vietnam, Nikita Krushchev, and even Fidel Castro.
Wu Ming, the "author," is actually a collective of five Italian writers (four of whom, known as "Luther Blissett," wrote the Reformation novel, Q). While this device allows for enormous creativity, the accumulation of vast amounts of period detail, and the introduction of more characters than I can recall in one novel in a long time, the novel suffers from a looseness in construction and a lack of control. The grand finale, while worthy of James Bond, is actually anticlimactic as the various plots come together more than five hundred pages after they began.
Filled with local color--bars, casinos, races, card games, and political movements--the novel is often lively and fun to read. The points of view and location change every few pages, however, and the reader often feels as if s/he is reading four separate novels simultaneously. Humor and irony pervade the novel, including sections written from the point of view of a TV set, a scheme to make a Madonna weep, and a satiric view of an FBI agent. There's a lot of everything in this novel! One wishes its authors had subjected it to more vigorous pruning. Mary Whipple
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 August 2005'54 is a great literary thriller, in the vein of Umbert Eco. If you liked In The Name of the Rose, you'll love this. The four standds of the story are all excellent individual and work well and interlink succesfully as a whole. The chapters on Cary Grant in particular are excellent - they capture the man well and are written with wit and authenticity. The book features a dazzling array of charaters, from Mafiosi to Hitcock. Highly recommended.
- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 February 2010Q was a marvelous book. It conveyed ideas that could hardly have been put forward in any other way. It uses the reformation as an analogy for a modern political and socialogical struggle and succeeds brilliantly. This is surely the point of the wu ming collective.
54 does not achieve what it sets out to. It retains the thiller-esque style of the authors' debut but does not stike the same pertinent chords and so remains little less than a mediocre thriller. Admittedly, the characters are excellently drawn and it is funny in parts, but I don't think this is enough. I suspect this book remains unique, but I was looking for something else, the something which made Q great and Wu ming stand out as a collective of authors besides being just that, a collective. I just don't think it was there.
I hope Wu Ming's new book Manituana, is a great as Q, certainly the content seems more apt for a politically motivated novel, but 54 dissappointed me.
Top reviews from other countries
- trevornewlandReviewed in Canada on 30 December 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Original
These fellows are always original with their premises and storylines.
- Amazon CustomerReviewed in the United States on 11 October 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Great book!
- W. ChenReviewed in the United States on 5 July 2008
4.0 out of 5 stars A wild ride
An intricate storyline set mostly in Italy in the year 1954, in the midst of the cold war. Most characters are associated with the communists to one degree or another. With a mixture of true people and historical events, it gives the readers a strong sense of time and places. Friendship, love, crime, adventure, ideology, international intrigue, and politics all intertwined into a complex web.
The first hundred pages are not easy read as various plotlines start almost disjointedly. Too many characters to follow without any hint of who are the important ones. But after that, pieces start to fall into places, and wow, what a ride to the very end.
- Robert BonacoltaReviewed in the United States on 15 January 2015
4.0 out of 5 stars ... background in the history the book talks about but great volume.
It helps to have a background in the history the book talks about but great volume.