STELLA'S REVIEW:
“I wonder if I am allowed to love my sister Baby more than I love the Duce.” Penny ranks her love for her sister against her love of Jesus, Mussolini, Italy and the Fatherland, and compares all this to love for her yellow bear. It’s 1944 in fascist Italy. Penny and Baby, orphaned, have been left in the care of Uncle Wilhelm and Aunt Katchen. They attend school where they sing fascist songs and wear their Piccola Italiana uniforms with pride. At home, their uncle won’t allow them to go to mass and Penny finds herself constantly in trouble for her high spiritedness. Yet, it’s a happy life with her loving Uncle and Aunt, the cousins and the adoring household servants. Penny and Baby have a good life in the country and spend hours in the fields and the woods playing games both imaginative, and punitive, with the village children. Many of their games include penitent actions, as Penny knows that to save their Jewish Uncle from Hell sacrifices have to be made. Many of Penny’s ideas are hilarious and wrong-footed in the way that only children can achieve. The Sky is Falling is a charming, deceptive and ultimately shocking autofiction. Like the sisters, Penny and Baby, filmmaker, artist, and writer Lorenza Mazzetti and her twin were left with their relatives after their mother died. They lived in Italy during the second world war and witnessed the deaths of their family. In the 1950s, having made their way to England, Mazzetti talked her way into The Slade and began making films. She was instrumental as a founder of the Free Cinema and won several prestigious awards before returning to Italy in the late 1950s. (In this new translation, there’s an excellent introduction by Ali Smith about Mazzetti, and a thoughtful critique of this novel). However, Mazzetti’s alter ego Penny is younger, and this makes the end of childhood innocence all the more shocking and enables the author to playfully compose situations which are blackly, hilariously funny. She captures the voice, feelings and thoughts of a chid — their truth, as well as their missteps — with honesty in simple evocative language. The beautifully produced book from Another Gaze Editions includes a series of naive drawings by the author, adding to the air of impending doom. This is a novel about facing down trauma and about exposing the cruel and often arbitrary nature of war. It is carefully calibrated, the tension teased out by Penny’s often riotous behaviour, witty dialogue and sharp observation; yet builds without relief to its inevitable horrific end.