December 2020. A Grave for a Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno

1956, Andre Deutch, 192 pages. Written in Italian, read in English.

I’ve tried to write the article about this book three or four times, and failed. And deleted it and started again.

Here are the facts, at least as far as I could find them: Alberto Denti di Pirajno served as the personal physician to Prince Amedeo, duke of Aosta, for over twenty years. In 1937, the duke of Aosta took the governorship of the east African countries that were conquered and ruled by Italy — Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia (then Somaliland) — renamed Italian East Africa. Denti di Pirajno travelled with him, and within that capacity also became an administrative representative of the duke and the country in east and north Africa, eventually becoming the governor of Tripoli between 1941 and 1943, when Tripoli fell, along with the rest of the Lybian territories and other Italian-ruled African countries, to the hands of the British forces during the second world war. Eventually, Denti was awarded a peerage of his own, becoming the duke of Pirajno (hence the addition to his name).

Here are some more facts: Since 1922, the government of Italy was a fascist regime led by Benito Mussolini. And the last years of Denti di Pirajno’s administrative duties in north Africa, when he was governor of Tripoli, were also the years in which some of the Jews of Lybia were deported to Tripoli, and from there, those that did not have dual citizenships were sent to various concentration camps in Lybia itself.

Beyond these, there are speculations. The sources that I could find are not generous about the breadth of information they provide about Denti di Pirajno, and most of what he’s known for today are the books he’s written — two of which were collections of stories providing anecdotal detail of his tenure in east and north Africa. It is unfair to judge a person by his proximity to the darker side of history — to base decisions on speculations and logical deductions. Maybe he was vocal against the fascist regime he became part of; maybe he operated against that regime clandestinely; maybe he did whatever was in his power to save as many Jews as he could during the last years of Italy’s occupation of north Africa; maybe he was too small a cog to make a difference anyway. We will never know, because all we have left from him are his books, and those only shed some light on some of his observations of his work in east and north Africa. So, we shall focus on the books.

“A Grave for a Dolphin” is the second of two collections of stories covering Denti di Pirajno’s years in Africa. I haven’t read the first, “A Cure for Serpents”, which was more well known at the time (it’s likely this book was a response to that, trying to bank on the successful format of the previous), but I can assume that they both share a similar format — each chapter is a separate story, not necessarily ordered chronologically, bearing an intriguing title (the book title itself is also the title of one of the chapters). At their basis, all of the stories reflect some conflict, told from an admiring and curious perspective, between Denti di Pirajno’s culture and the cultures that he encountered during his stay in the various countries he’s visited. In addition to being a representative of the government, he was also a doctor, and as such was well respected by the people he met, and some of the stories reflect on the conflict between his medical knowledge and education and the traditions of the locals — and how successful their cures are as opposed to his for various diseases. Some of the stories, including the story that bears the title of the book, are told to him by his patients and friends, and have some sheen of fairytales.

The book is not ordered in any chronological manner, but it is ordered in a thematic manner. It starts with an anecdote from Denti di Pirajno’s childhood in Aosta, and ends with a story about a condemned man and his relation to a bird who’s the only visitor to his jail cell. And between these, Denti di Pirajno summarizes, are the entirety of life. A life that, at least from the perspective of Denti di Pirajno and what we know of him, should only hold anecdotal details of a visit to an alien culture.

The January 2021 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture by George Steiner