Brifle enthusiasts, neo-fascists, a woman victim of madness and an elderly woman in RSA, even extraterrestrials. The protagonists of Luce d’Eramo’s novels are mostly uncomfortable creaturesto which she knows how to give voice. A curious and keen observer, the little girl who spent hours watching the ants with fascination, as an adult she became an entomologist of the human soul, his and others.
«I am attracted by diversity, that which cannot be traced back to behaviors accepted by all, “compliant”» he says in a long interview contained in I am an alien, a collection of three essays published in 1999 and republished by Feltrinelli in 2025, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, with a preface by Margaret Mazzantini and a text by her son Marco d’Eramo, sociologist and journalist. It is his last book before his death in 2001.
Luce D’Eramo and his masterpiece: “Deviation”
In twentieth-century literature, Luce D’Eramo left an indelible mark with the novel Deviation (1979), a memoir in which she unravels with formidable courage her story as a non-ordinary, stubborn and rebellious, unlucky and resilient girl. And as an adult who knew how to go hand in hand with tragedy and pain, without ever letting herself be swayed. When Luce Mangione – this is the family surname – born in 1925 in France, Mussolini has been in power for three years. His parents, Publio, pilot, painter and entrepreneur, and Maria Concetta, are convinced fascists. The mother is secretary of the Fascio.
Luce d’Eramo in 1946 at 21 years old. Wikimedia Photo – Marco d’Eramo (son and heir)
Little Lucette grows up perfectly bilingual, even if her schoolmates call her “la petite italienne” or “la petite macaroni”, giving her the chance to discover diversity first handthe alien being he talks about in his latest book. She is a smart little girl, hungry for books and knowledge. At home, in secret, he read Dickens and Maupassant which sparked his curiosity about the world of the poorest workers.
From Paris to Alatri, he discovers himself out of place
In 1938, on the eve of the outbreak of war, the Mangione family returned to Italy. Lucette becomes Lucetta and is catapulted from cosmopolitan Paris to Alatri, in Ciociaria. She enrolls in classical high school and discovers that even at home she is out of place: here she is “the French girl”. When the family moves to Rome for her father’s work reasons, the girl completes her high school diploma in the capital (skipping two classes: she is a brilliant student) and enrolls in literature at university. 1943 was a key year for her and for Italy: the regime falls, the Mangiones flee to Bassano del Grappa and the father then becomes undersecretary of the Republic of Salò. One day, in Padua, Lucetta sees a group of prisoners surrounded by the SS. Are the men in uniform, allies of the Italians, really evil and murderers? She wants to find out for herself. She runs away from home and enlists as a volunteer worker in Germany. A little girl from a wealthy family who chooses to go to the factory staying in a concentration camp is a real rarity.
He demands a fair ration for the Russians
In 1944, while the men were at the front, over seven million foreign workers carried out production in the Reich’s companies. With photos of Mussolini and Hitler in her backpack, Luce reaches Frankfurt to become one of them. As a foreign worker from an allied country, she falls into the category that enjoys the best treatment from the Nazis. Prisoners of war, members of the Resistance, forcibly recruited Eastern European workersbecome the companions of this first phase of d’Eramo’s experience, told within Deviationat the IG Farben company.
Deviation of Light of Eramo, Feltrinelli416 pages, €23.75
The concentration camp where he is staying is not an extermination campworkers are fed to be strong. Here too, they consider her an infiltrator, or worse, a spy. Rejected by Westerners, she fraternizes with the Russians and in an epic page of her story he stands up to the factory director to demand a ration for the Soviets of the same level as that of other Europeans, worthy of “the Nazi-fascist promises of civilization”. He now speaks perfect German and is also learning Russian. Little by little, however, he ends up in the spiral that engulfs everyone: hunger, small businesses to obtain food, dirt. But he still has the strength to conspire to organize a strike, which will end badly.
Luce’s friends – who is now Luzi – are sent to Dachau camp. In a moment of weakness, she attempts suicide. She will be saved: then repatriation awaits her. When she finds herself in Verona, she is far from happy: the idea of facing her parents’ anger and returning to her old life is unbearable for her. With a sensational twist of the head, he gets himself arrested by a group of SS and ends up in Dachau. And here he knows the brutalization, the real one.
The collapse of a wall, the beginning of the ordeal
«In the 12 weeks that I stayed in Dachau I never stopped marveling at the incredible amount of discomfort that the human organism can endure. (…) In weakened bodies, minds also shut down” he writes. This time the treatment is different: she got caught by giving a false identity and the Nazis put her among the antisocialnot among the political prisoners as she had hoped. He never stops observing and thinking. The jailers are «executors of those who had disintegrated their consciences. (…) It was enough not to be impressed by the look of authority that the slave-tyrants gave themselves.”
Luzi stops being afraid of them and the wolfdogs of the camp and plans to escape. She succeeds by being recruited as a volunteer in the sewer cleaning team. She escapes, wanders the devastated German countryside, and gets closer to her date with destiny when she gets hired as a waitress at a hotel in Mainz. «February 27 is a date that we have celebrated with a toast for his entire life» writes Marco d’Eramo. Luce will thus remember, in his own way, that tragedy. That day in 1945 after a bombing, Luce digs to free the buried Germans. A wall suddenly collapses, the girl remains under the rubble. She will be paralyzed. Thus began his ordeal: a life marked, as she herself says, by 15 operations, a dozen pelvic casts, excruciating pain, fever, a wheelchair.
Lucetta returned to Italy in December 1945. He is twenty years old and has a bright future that no longer exists. Anyone would have let it get him down, but not her. “For years the most disgusting thing for me was the pity of others, in the form of admiration for my so-called courage,” he writes in Deviation. «I made it a point of honor to always appear strong, cheerful, serene». In 1946, at the Rizzoli hospital in Bologna she met Pacifico d’Eramo, a war veteran like her and a law student. The two fall in love, get married and in 1947 their son Marco is born. Four years later he graduated in Literature, then in Philosophy. In post-war Italy which offers opportunities to those who want to roll up their sleeves, Luce does not hold back. She is a translator, gives private lessons, participates in competitions and calls for scholarships. Travel, drive a car. But her relationship with her husband, whose surname she will keep throughout her career as a writer and essayist, is deteriorating. She doesn’t accept his betrayals and asks for separation, followed by divorce.
The teaching: you write for others
With her newfound freedom, Luce fills her house with people. “I hosted ex-prisoners, single mothers, a dozen cats,” he writes. He indulges in a lifestyle beyond his means so that the son would not feel “different, an only child of an invalid and alone mother”. This chaos only subsides when he realizes that someone is taking advantage of his generosity. His health and finances deteriorate and he ends up spending time in a clinic. For some time now he has begun to think about the past and write about it: they are the first pieces of his literary masterpiece, Deviation. The girl from the factory, who left fascist and returned communist without ever severing her ties with the Catholic world, she becomes friends with Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, Ignazio Silone and Cesare Zavattinicollaborates with literary and political magazines. Her great friend is Camilla Cederna. «A voracious, inexhaustible curiosity» characterizes her, according to Marco. Also towards the kids of ’68 and their ideas.
«The true masterpiece was her» comments Margaret Mazzantini in the prefacewho knew her. «Tireless, capable of delving into the highest reasoning with simplicity and frugality, without ever losing sight of the human condition». On the writer, he adds: «I remember her teaching which I have made my own: you write for others, for yourself more discreet activities are enough, thinking, keeping a diary. You write to multiply your experience.” As long as he could, Luce traveled the world. Then, in 1988 an accident broke the fragile balance of his health. Returning from the Frankfurt Book Fair, someone hits his wheelchair at the airport. «Fractures, the beginning of physical decline, new operations, increasingly brutal pain, the desire to diethe desire to live hanging on the sole possibility of writing, working, imagining new stories” writes Marco. He will survive again. The alien who considered all the mistreated of Earth her closest neighbors will close her eyes forever in 2001.