“Signorina, we're all living through an experience that will furnish us with something to reflect on for a long time, and for me, perhaps all my life.” Manno, who speaks these words, does not have much time left. He is home briefly after escaping from the rout in North Africa and on his way to another assignment where he will die a hero's death at the battle of Cassino. But Eugenio Corti, the author of this epic novel of Italy's involvement in World War II and the difficult post-war aftermath, has guaranteed the truth of Manno's prediction.

First published in Italy in 1983, The Red Horse is a big book that seems to be settling in for a very long shelf life. It has been translated into Spanish, French and Lithuanian, with new editions in Japanese and Romanian. This marks its first appearance in English. The author is a Catholic writer and intellectual who personally experienced the atrocities of war on the Russian front and, later, as an Italian freedom fighter.

So powerful, so horrific, so apocalyptic are these experiences that they inevitably challenge the reader to carefully consider the author's clearly stated political agenda and cultural analysis. Corti points us unabashedly to “the fruits to which the distancing from Christianity leads today” after the triple distortions of Fascism, Nazism and, particularly, Communism.

In contrast, he presents the society and people from the Lombardian town of Brianza and its environs. Here true Roman pietas, a deep love of country and family, blend with traditional forms of religious piety, love of God and his holy Mother, and reverence for the Church. Most of the story revolves around the people from this town, the Riva family who own the local textile factory, and their friends and associates. Some are richer than others; some, more educated.

But as the story begins and Italy has not yet entered the war, the characters embody these twin sets of virtue, pietas and piety, unconsciously. After entering the war, they grasp them for succor and, in the political and moral corruption endemic in the post-war period, they need to choose these values and fight for them, lest their patrimony be lost altogether.

The Red Horse by Eugenio Corti Ignatius Press, 2000 1015 pages, $29.95

The author speculates “comedy and tragedy really do intermingle and alternate continuously in life.” Reading this book, I was more convinced of tragedy than its cheerful counterpart. Some images are poignant, such as the mothers who frequented the train stations waving photographs of their missing sons in the hopes that someone would have news from the Russian front. How, after all, could 100,000 people disappear without a trace?

Other images are so horrific that I can barely stand to think of them. There is painful, useless death; random cruelty everywhere. There is escalating cannibalism among the Russian people and within the prisoner-of-war camps. These scenes are bad enough but Michele surely travels to the inner circle of hell when he enters a room of prisoners sitting still and falling dead, one by one, because they were told if they stopped being cannibals and were quiet, the Russians would feed them.

But if there is not much to laugh at, there is surely goodness and extraordinary courage. I need only think of the stalwart Paccoi refusing to abandon his lieutenant Ambrogio; the good Father Turla imprisoned with Michele; Gerardo Riva, the industrialist devoted to his employees and his wife who prayed without ceasing and could always get a good meal together for their visitors.

“Losing a son to war,” (Ambrogio) said to himself, “has no poetry about it, nothing. It's about the same as letting bodies decompose in among the weeds, after the battle is over.” This book often has no poetry. It is too long, often repetitious; it frequently veers off track into abstruse topics or into overly personalized interests. The omniscient-narrator point of view is cumbersome; the translation, leaden. But without a doubt, it captures the glory and the shame of the human body, soul and spirit, ultimately lifting the reader toward a deeper contemplation of God.

Maryanne Hannan writes from Troy, New York.