A Bell for Adano
by John Hersey
Summary
Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian American civil affairs officer from the Bronx, is put in charge of Adano, a small Sicilian town, in the summer of 1943, days after the Allied landings. His job is military government: food, fishing permits, sanitation, the crooked officials the Fascists left behind. What he actually sets himself to restore is the town's bell, seven hundred years old and melted down by Mussolini's war effort, because he understands before anyone explains it that the bell is what the town misses most.
Hersey builds the book as a string of small administrative parables. Joppolo learns names, listens, bends stupid rules and enforces sensible ones, and watches democracy make sense to people exactly as fast as it behaves decently. The town's fishermen, its priest, its pretty translator and its reformed and unreformed officials fill the chapters, and the tone stays light without going soft.
The exception is General Marvin, the theatre commander, who arrives in a rage, has a mule shot for blocking his road, and bans the carts on which the town's food and water move. Joppolo countermands the order because the alternative is letting Adano starve, and the novel then waits, with the reader, for the paperwork of that decency to catch up with him. It does, in the last pages, with a quiet brutality that makes the whole fable land.
Around two hundred and seventy pages, fast and warm.
Best for readers who want the Second World War at the scale of one town's plumbing, and an argument about occupation that has not aged a day.
Historical Context & Significance
A Bell for Adano won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1945, while the war was still on. John Hersey was a correspondent who had covered the Sicily invasion, and Joppolo was modelled on Major Frank Toscani, the military governor of Licata, whom Hersey had watched work. General Marvin was read at once, and accurately, as George Patton, whose treatment of Sicilian civilians and whose temper were notorious in the theatre, and the portrait was unsparing enough that the book doubled as a public accusation.
It became a Broadway play in 1944 with Fredric March and a film in 1945, and television remade it repeatedly through the fifties and sixties.
Hersey's next act made this one look small: Hiroshima, his 1946 account of six survivors of the atomic bomb, took over an entire issue of The New Yorker and became perhaps the most influential piece of journalism of the century. The novel that won his Pulitzer is now the second thing he is remembered for, which is not a criticism of it.