Deviation

Description

Lucie was brought up by bourgeois parents as a passionate young fascist. At the age of eighteen, she decides to volunteer in the Nazi labour camps in Germany. Wishing to disprove what she sees as the lies that are being told about Nazi-Fascism, she instead encounters the horrors of life there - and is changed completely. Shedding her identity, she joins a group of deportees being sent to Dachau concentration camp. She escapes the camp in October 1944, and wanders around a Germany devastated by allied bombardments. Then, in February 1945, while helping dig in rubble seeking to rescue survivors, a wall falls on her and she is left paralysed from the waist down. Translated into English for the first time, Deviation is an autobiographical novel about the repression of memory, and one woman's attempt to make sense of the hell she has lived through.

Luce d'Eramo was born in 1925 in France. The daughter of Italian parents, she lived in France until her family returned to Italy in 1938. From a bourgeois Fascist family, she studied at the Sapienza in Rome and was a member of the Association of Fascist Students. When she was 18, she left home to volunteer in the Nazi labour camps, but then joined a group of deportees being sent to Dachau, from which she escaped in October 1944. She was left severely paralysed in 1945. d'Eramo went on to earn degrees in literature and philosophy and wrote many works of fiction and non-fiction, most famously Deviation, published in 1979. She died in Rome in 2001.