The Fourth Shore

Alessandro Spina

Simon and Schuster

2019

480 páginas

16h 0m

ISBN-13: 9781628728392

Inglês

The modern classic about the colonization of Libya continues, as Italy watches its prized colony slip away. The Confines of the Shadow maps the transformation of the Libyan city of Benghazi from a sleepy Ottoman backwater in the 1910s to the second capital of an oil-rich kingdom in the 1960s. The short stories that comprise this second volume are set in the period between the late 1920s, when Italy began solidifying its power in its new Libyan colony, and the end of World War II, when control of the country passed into British hands. Italian military officers idle their time away at their club or by exploring the strange lands where they have been posted, always at odds between the nationalistic education they received at home and the lessons theyve learned during their time in Libya. Employing a cosmopolitan array of characters, ranging from Italian soldiers to Ottoman functionaries, The Fourth Shore (the term was Mussolinis name for the Mediterranean shore of Libya) chronicles Italys colonial experience from the euphoria of conquestgiving the reader a front-row seat to the rise and subsequent fall of Fascism in the aftermath of World War IIto the countrys independence in the 1950s. The discovery of Libyas vast oil and gas reserves will trigger the tumultuous changes that led to Muammar Gaddafis forty-two-year dictatorship.