Mercury Pictures Presents

In Marra’s novel, the Busento in San Lorenzo is crowded with treasure hunters. Massive excavation works search for Alaric’s tomb. Ferrando seeks the body of Michele, and Concetta seeks the body of Vincent. However, only Nino emerges from the waters, spotted and rescued almost accidentally by Giuseppe.

The loved ones of those Nino left behind envy and resent his survival and escape from San Lorenzo. Like Maria, he carries a terrible burden of guilt. He feels that he has to make atonement to Maria for the loss of her father and to Concetta for the loss of her son, but also vicariously to Anna because she, too, was deprived of a son and does not know what became of him.

Nino/Vincent spends much of his life in confino. Born in San Lorenzo, he escapes briefly to pursue his legal studies in Rome but is transported back as a convict after trying to cross the border to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. In Los Angeles, his “enemy alien” status means that his freedom of movement is restricted once more. As he puts it, “You travel halfway around the world just to end up in confino again” (224).

As well as physical and legal restrictions, Nino/Vincent lives in a psychological prison engendered by his survivor’s guilt. Like the passport photos he collects, he remains torn between his Italian roots and his American present. When asked if he would consider returning to Europe after the war, he remarks that he has yet to leave Italy: “The question for me isn’t whether to return to Europe but whether to finally leave it” (339).

Nino/Vincent’s changing view of his profession as a photographer provides an interesting commentary on the theme of realism and fantasy. He begins his photographic career committed to documentary realism. However, he soon learns that, in war, capturing the reality of conflict is almost impossible, and artifice can serve to communicate powerful truths. He reflects on the photograph by Capa that first inspired him to pursue a photography career: “Even if it was staged, it remained the most powerful indictment of political violence Vincent had ever seen” (376).

Like Maria, Anna is a professionally ambitious woman seeking to advance in a male-dominated profession. As a student in Berlin, she recalls, “The school relegated its few female students to weaving workshops and reserved its architecture courses for men” (246).

Marra presents Anna’s work as a miniaturist as a means to overcome her impotence in the face of catastrophic historical events. When she rebuilds Berlin in miniature, she becomes godlike, hovering omniscient over the city in all its complexity: “She felt lofted into an omniscient altitude from which she peered down on streetcars and cafes and slums” (241). This “bird’s eye” view will acquire dark connotations when Anna’s skills are put to use in air raids on the city.

Anna is a key figure in developing the novel’s recurrent theme of Integrity Versus Contingency Under Authoritarian Rule: The Faustian Pact. Anna is faced with two “devil’s bargains” throughout the novel: the first when Hasso offers her the Olympic Village architectural commission in exchange for joining the Nazi Party and the second when she is recruited to reconstruct Berlin to help the military prepare to bomb the city. Paradoxically, although she chooses differently each time, she maintains her moral principles the first time and accepts a situation with which she is morally uncomfortable the second. Both decisions have disastrous consequences and deprive her of her beloved son.

At the end of the novel, while the other characters manage to find some kind of closure and prepare to move forward, Anna finds her sense of loss and guilt insurmountable and elects to share the fate of her fellow Berliners.

Artie is a flamboyant showman who stands in marked contrast to his more pragmatic, politically ambitious, and socially aspirational twin, Ned. The divergent lifestyles of the identical twin brothers mark their differing attitudes to life in their adopted country.

Unlike Ned, Artie rebels against perceived political injustice and worries about the moral implications of his actions. He successfully stands up to the Senate Investigation Into Motion Picture War Propaganda and succeeds in producing Devil’s Bargain. However, as he faces a series of increasingly fraught moral choices, Artie finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile personal ambition with ethical integrity. When he is told to dismiss his German and Italian photographic staff, he protests the unfairness of the decision but ultimately complies. Again, while he initially backs Maria and Eddie’s bold proposal to present a counternarrative to the prevalent racist stereotypes through False Front, he backs down as soon as the omnipotent “board” threatens his position.

Artie’s growing strain is reflected in the failure of his collection of toupees to cover his growing bald spot. Each toupee is a persona, a pose that Artie strikes in his business dealings: “He’d named his toupees after their personalities: the Heavyweight, The Casanova, The Optimist, The Edison, The Odysseus, The Mephistopheles” (4).

Yet all of these postures just mask his weakness and vulnerability. Artie’s bald spot is in some ways emblematic of the burden of survivor’s guilt that he carries with him. Like Vincent and Maria, Artie is acutely aware that his new life in America was paid for with another’s sacrifice—in his case, that of his sister, Ada.