On Gramsci’s Fall: A Review
Gramsci’s Fall.
In Nora Bossong’s latest novel,
Gramsci’s Fall, we meet forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver whose marriage is falling apart with extra-marital affairs coming to a close and a career in a German university at a dead end. When he is offered an opportunity to research on one of Antonio Gramsci’s missing notebooks, he fights with his wife and readily agrees to join his friend in Rome in the hope to finally make a breakthrough with his childhood obsession. As he delves into Gramsci’s past, we find our narrator falling in love with a young woman, visiting his own past; a childhood he wishes to abandon, a marriage that was a bad decision, a career that never took off and then a child to fulfil his middle-class ideal life.