The Human Body by Paolo Giordano

Published in Italy in 2012; published in translation by Pamela Dorman Books on October 2, 2014. As you can see in the comment section of this post, the book was translated by Anne Milano Appel.

The Human Body follows several Italian soldiers, beginning on the day before they leave on a mission to Afghanistan and ending after they return home. The Italians are charged with maintaining a "security bubble" after American soldiers have cleansed the area of people they identify as insurgents. "Security" includes such tasks as protecting the military's washing machines from sandstorms. We know from the prolog that Lt. Alessandro Egitto (the only doctor at the Italians' Forward Operating Base) will receive a four month suspension for an "incident" that occurs during the mission. We do not learn the nature of the accusation, however, until the final chapter.

The reader spends most of the novel's first half becoming acquainted with the characters, including Egitto, who is dealing (not particularly well) with a dying father and an indifferent sister back home. Only a couple of the Italians in uniform are female. One of those is an intelligence officer who has a history with Egitto. Again, we do not understand her full importance to the story until the novel is nearly finished.

War provides the background, leading to a pivotal moment of lethal violence in an eventful second half, but most of the drama in the first half comes from internal battles. A male stripper/prostitute who left behind an unplanned pregnancy wrestles with the contents of an email that will say yes or no to an abortion. A virgin wants to stay alive so his mother (the only woman in his life) will not feel the pain of his loss. A soldier worries that his internet chatmate might be a guy pretending to be a female. Some characters worry about their inhumane treatment of innocent Afghan families while others loath every Afghan as if they were all Taliban.

In the end, the novel is about the impact of the war on the soldiers. The men cope (or fail to cope) with fear, with guilt, with anger, with loneliness, with worry that they will be just as lonely when they make it home. Egitto describes himself as turning into "something abstract," something that is no longer a human being. Another soldier, facing death, regrets all the squabbles he had with a woman when (he realizes) he should simply have been satisfied to receive her love and understanding. Another is haunted by a small act of selfishness that leads to a tragic consequence. A colonel reflects upon his inability to remember the faces of the men who die under his command. One of the men, after returning home, is assured that he will soon become "the man he was before," but he knows that is neither possible nor desirable.

War changes people but, as key characters realize, so does the act of living. We cannot control all the events that change us, the novel suggests, but how we respond to those events is what matters. Paolo Giordano's keen illustration of that lesson earns The Human Body my strong recommendation.

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