The Immigrants by Moreno Giovannoni review – family history fuels a novel of understated beauty

The Guardian

2 days ago

Sitting somewhere between fiction and memoir, Moreno Giovannoni's second novel is a tenderly written portrait of life for one Italian family living and working in Australia.
Arriving in Melbourne in 1957, Ugo – the author's father – is determined to make the most of the plentiful work opportunities in 'the colony' (Giovannoni refers to Australia as 'the colony' throughout the book). His young wife Morena is left behind in Italy, along with their infant son Moreno. A year after Ugo leaves, Morena and her son also set sail, despite the plan being for Ugo to go alone and to return with the profits of his labour. It's a move Morena will always regret.
This book is both an ode to Ugo and Morena and a kind of history of immigrant labour in postwar Australia. Giovannoni writes most vividly about his father. Ugo is well spoken – by small-town Italian standards – an excellent dancer and snappy dresser. These traits help him win the approval of Morena's parents. Early in the novel we hear Ugo and Morena's voices directly, via interview transcriptions. I adored these interludes, they captured so much of the personality of these two characters. They talk about their childhoods, their families and villages, their courtship in Italy, and how they lived and worked once they arrived in Australia. You cannot imagine two people working harder. These voices carry the unique texture of their suffering and struggle.
Life for Italian immigrants in Australia in the years immediately after the second world war is full of work opportunities (relative to back home, particularly), and Ugo and Morena focus on the art of growing tobacco. Soon after arriving they relocate four hours north of Melbourne. They work for others, then set out on their own. Countless pages of this book are filled with the processes of producing tobacco – propagation, irrigation, harvest – and while this might sound boring, I found it fascinating. This isn't just farming, it's life, and Giovannoni writes with proud, respectful insight about his parents, their fellow immigrants and their work.
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At the same time, The Immigrants is shot through with the sometimes subtle, sometimes shocking acts of violence and racism that characterised that time. Giovannoni chronicles the dangers of growing tobacco and living in rural isolation – from farming accidents to snake bites. These hazards may be par for the course in primary industries, but discrimination – experienced in hospitals, in police stations or in the wider community – is always lurking within these hardships, making them that much harder to bear. We also read of racially motivated hate crimes. Violence is embedded in these chapters of Australian history. It is marked on the bodies and minds of these immigrants.
Giovannoni's focus isn't just his parents (and his own experiences in childhood and adolescence), he also writes about the community of immigrants in which the family is embedded. In many ways this network is all that sustains Ugo and Morena. Reading about a brimming social life, much of which radiates from the local cafe and picture theatre, one feels one is witnessing a kind of lost golden age. For the Giovannoni family, this isn't just a matter of mixing with similar kinds of people, it's about culture, survival and education.
Giovannoni relates the massive impact that watching Italian films has on his sense of self: 'To sit in a picture theatre in a small English colonial town at his age [10] with his mother and father and little brother and hundreds of Italians watching an Italian film, and understand the film and the audience, teaches him that he belongs to a different category of people.' He belongs, despite his difference from other parts of Australian society; despite the fact his extended family live so far away.
The desire to return to the homeland is something the young Moreno doesn't consciously feel, but he and his parents do make several returns to Italy. 'He realises much later that his mother and father have been talking about it since the day they arrived. In the Tuscan language, rimpatrio, one of those words that is a false friend, means to return home.' One of the joys of this novel is the way Giovannoni quotes his parents speaking in their native tongue, the language the great Italian poet Dante spoke.
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The Immigrants is an understatedly beautiful book, about a critically important part of Australia's history and social fabric. The labour and suffering of Moreno's family and others like them is fittingly remembered, and celebrated, in these pages.
The Immigrants by Moreno Giovannoni is out through Black Inc ($36.99)