A Review of: Three Horses by Erri De Luca

One ought to feel good about reading Erri de Luca. Born in 1950, the Neapolitan was meant to be a diplomat but was diverted by the exigencies of leftist politics. He worked at the Fiat factory, laid stones, and rode relief convoy in Yugoslavia. He didn’t publish until age thirty-nine. Over the course of twenty-odd books (including a No. 1 bestseller in Italy), he has become a sort of major minor figure in European letters; enough so to judge Cannes.

His sentences are short, the words small, and the attempts at transport palpable. Often his prose exhibits an archaic formality—which can be jarringly unrealistic when caught between quote marks—not unlike the aphoristic poetry of the Old Testament. (De Luca taught himself Yiddish in order to translate the Bible.) He favors quiet old men who carry the weight of the past on their backs, in one case literally. Prix Femina Étranger winner God’s Mountain (2001) features a Cronenbergish leitmotif in which a cobbler’s “wings” gradually, audibly, break through his hump. It shares a theme with his other translated novels, Sea of Memory (1998) and, now, Three Horses (1999): In a political world, men are impelled to violence for the sake of women; in love or something like it, the men do so with the prior knowledge that the future is a dead dream, or that they are in fact destroying it.

This has some shock value. Scenes of serenity, of a world-wary maturity induced by physical labor precede it, up until the last few pages. “Without beauty the tree can’t manage,” thinks the fifty-year-old gardener and narrator of Three Horses. “So I stop at one spot in the field and ask, ‘Is this where you want to be?’” He has his routines, a good way of maintaining composure. Mornings he puts his coffee on the stove (“All it takes to fill a room”). He drinks wine and reads (only used) books at the tavern, where, one day, a woman catches his eye and later slips him her number. Besides the proprietor and Selim, an African day laborer to whom the gardener regularly gives flowers and herbs to sell, she is his only human contact. Laila, by her own account, is a former dentist who turned to prostitution after a close call with a bleeding canine. “You’re to the south and I feel like someone who is going...