Books & Authors

 This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in To Each His Own, 

with a note of reference.

The epigraph To Each His Own comes from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: “Let it not be supposed that I am detailing any mystery, or penning any romance.”

The three days of deep mourning had passed, and therefore Laurana felt he would be committing no indiscretion in going to Dean Rosello, to ask for the loan of the copy of the Osservatore Romano between the first of July and the fifteenth of August that carried an article on Manzoni which he urgently needed in his work.

The professor was out on the terrace, sitting in an armchair, With a gramophone beside him from which issued the now stentorian, now tremulous, now whispering voice of a famous actor who was reciting Canto XXX of the Inferno.

Laurana leaned over the open book, In the words leaped out at him from the page: “ only the action that affects the organization of a system exposes men to the harsh light of the law.” Taking the whole page in at a glance, as if he were unfurling a screen rather than reading the lines, he recognized the context; it was where the writer speaks of Camus and The Stranger.

“I was reading the Casanova memoirs, the unexpurgated text. In French,” he added, with a touch of satisfaction.

“ I haven’t read them yet,” Laurana said.
“It’s not that there are so many differences from the edition we know. A little less florid, perhaps . . . I was thinking that if one considers the memoirs as a kind of exotic manual, the most interesting, the truest thing is this: that it is easier to seduce two or three women together than to seduce one alone.”
“Is that so?” the professor said, marveling.
“A fact, I assure you,” the rector said, placing his hand over his heart.

“Literary criticism?” the deputy said, and he raised in inquisitorial eyebrow, “ and what have you written by way of literary criticism?” Some short pieces... on Quasimodo, Campana . . .” “Unh-unh, Quasimodo,” the Deputy said, abruptly disenchanted.

An evening at the club was for him like reading a book —Prindello or Brancati, depending on the theme and tone of the conversation, but most often, as it happened, the warmly ribald Brancati. That is why he went to the club assiduously; it was the brief respite in his day.

 Vitaliano Brancati

 He was passionately scrupulous about his work and so, being busy with these tasks, he almost managed to forget the affair in which he had got himself embroiled; whenever he did think of it, he saw it as detached and distant, in style, form, and also somewhat in content delineated rather in the manner of a Graham Greene novel.

Since Laurana had already taken a book from his pocket, Signor Romeris asked what book it might be. “Voltaire’s love letters,” Laurana said.

 “There are Marxist who haven’t read a single page of Marx,” Signor Romeris said.

 “And Populists”—The Baron persisted in calling Christian Democrats by the Party’s old name—“Populists who haven’t read one page of Don Sturzo.”

 “ Why were we talking about Borgese?  Only because, for sometime now, Laurana has had it in his head that Borgese’s  been underestimated and then he should be giving his just due.”

“And are you not of that opinion?” the Commissioner asked, with a hint of suspicion. 

“ in all conscience, I wouldn’t know. I’d have to reread him. . . . His Rube made it tremendous impression on me, but that was thirty years ago, my dear Commissioner, thirty years ago.”