Translated by John Shepley
The Marlboro Press, USA
Quartet Books, London
The Fifth Estate
In the introduction to the English translation of his first
novel, Camon explains that it was to be a "justification not of his
own life but of all my peasant people, the fifth estate, which itself has
never told its story, one of enormous heroism and age-old resignation".
The novel attracted eminent admirers: Pier Paolo Pasolini wanted to write
the preface to the Italian edition, Jean-Paul Sartre immediately had it
translated into French. Both recognized the novel as a faithful testimony
to the lives of ordinary people.
Camon calls his novel the "geography" of the Italian people. It
deals with a segment of the population whose customs have remained the
same for centuries, unaffected by the cultural and social changes that
have revolutionized the rest of Europe. The people do not speak the
language of their homeland, but in dialect; they remain transfixed by
age-old beliefs, the cult of the dead, departed spirits, fetishism, a
"pagan" Catholicism. They have no wish for involvement in the
rest of the world, seeking to remain under an oblivious cloud. Ferdinando
Camon chronicles the passing in our own time of an ageless civilization,
into which he himself was born.
The Fifth Estate is the first part of Ferdinando Camon's trilogy of
autobiographical novels, "Ciclo degli ultimi". With it he laid
the groundwork for a reputation that has now become worldwide. The
trilogy has already appeared in translation in the USA, the former Soviet
Union, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland,
Romania and Argentina.