Combattere le battaglie dei propri avi: memoria, storia e romanzo in Philipp Meyer, Viet Thanh Nguyen e Richard Flanagan

This essay argues that many recent important European narrative works (often “non-novels” that have innovated the form of the novel) stem from a yearning for a “lost feeling for History”. These works are all written by novelists born at least two decades after the end of WWII, the tragic-epic focus of the century portrayed in their writings. Focusing on what he calls the “Novel of Post-History”, Scurati extends his analysis to extra-European literatures in English, comparing Anglo-American and Australian writers, with a specific emphasis on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) and Philipp Meyer’s The Son (2013).