Background
Michele Prisco was born on January 18, 1920, in Torre Annunziata, Italy, to lawyer Salvatore Prisco and Annamaria Prisco.
Corso Umberto I, 40, 80138 Napoli NA, Italy
Carrying on the family tradition, Prisco, the youngest of eleven children, studied law, graduating from the University of Naples in 1942.
Michele Prisco was born on January 18, 1920, in Torre Annunziata, Italy, to lawyer Salvatore Prisco and Annamaria Prisco.
Carrying on the family tradition, Prisco, the youngest of eleven children, studied law, graduating from the University of Naples in 1942. He attended Scuola Allievi Ufficiali di Complemento for his military service in 1942-1943.
During his time in law school and military service, Prisco published short stories and wrote for newspapers and journals throughout Italy. After performing his family duty, Prisco abandoned convention and became a full-time writer.
Prisco began his examination of the human psyche through his first two works, La provincia addormentata (1949), a collection of eight stories set in Naples, and the novel Gli eredi del vento (1950). The latter tells the story of Mazzu, a police chief who marries a woman and upon her death proceeds to marry each of her five sisters over a period of time. Prisco’s 1961 novel, La dama di piazza, scrutinizes the social status of a community and the way in which people try to achieve it. The main character, Aurora, marries an older man in order to gain a better social position. But because of her background, she is ridiculed and in the end, is left alone. “Prisco’s relentless probing of her aspirations, values, and desires evokes both sympathy and repulsion in the reader,” comments Carmine Di Biase in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
One of his most well-known works, Una spirale di nehbia (1966), also provided Prisco with his share of critics. Finding his wife died under suspicious circumstances, the main character, Fabrizio, is subject to scrutiny by the townspeople. Over the course of several days, each town member’s own baseness and motivations are probed into. A Newsweek contributor faulted the novel: “This is a blowfish of a novel. It tries to swim the depths only to puff itself up with false vanity and empty rhetoric, rising pathetically to the shallows to show itself off for the bloated creature that it is.” However, the book won the Strega Prize in 1966.
Prisco’s next book, 7 cieli della sera (1970), further explores the motives of the human mind. David’s mother has died in an automobile accident and his father has committed suicide after murdering a friend. Fleeing from this violence in his past, David journeys to the south of Italy to try and make sense of the brutality that follows him. Alvaro, the narrator of Prisco’s novel Gli ermellini neri (1975), is a wanderer like David. But while David is fleeing from evil produced externally, Alvaro tries to flee from evil that is created internally. Ironically, Alvaro becomes obsessed with evil while at a seminary. Prisco would again touch on this formula of one man’s journey in 1989 with his book I giorni della conchiglia. Mauro, a forty-year-old married man, and father of a son searches for his past. Adopted at age six, through the course of the novel Mauro realizes that his older brother, who died, was in actuality his father. Like his previous characters, Mauro must confront his past in order to live in the future.
Prisco retraced his steps with his next two novels, Le parole del silenzio (1981) and Lo speech!o cieco, by re-examining the female psyche and the effects of social position, as he had done with his previous novel, La dama di piazza. Like Aurora, the main character of Le parole del silenzo, Cristina, is alone at the end of the novel, remembering the steps that led her to that point. Margherita is almost two characters in Lo specchio cieco. In the beginning of the novel she is a dull woman, while at the end of the novel she is the exact opposite. Prisco’s intention with Margherita was to show that depending on one’s mindset, either of the “Margheritas” are the true character.
11 pellicano di pietra (1996) deals with not one but two unhappy and complex women. Maddalena is a bitter recluse, living with the memories of her dead lover Alfonso, whose body was found in a pine grove. Because her mother Giuseppina disliked Alfonso, Maddalena harbors intense resentment and anger towards her mother. When Maddalena meets Osvaldo, a potential suitor, she tricks her mother into believing that Osvaldo is in love with Giuseppina. The mother, upon learning of her daughter’s treachery, kills Maddalena, and with her dead daughter’s hands and feet tied, dumps her in the exact spot her lover Alfonso’s body was found. “Giuseppina personifies a pitiless and unredeemed vision of the feminine condition; in the context of the novel, life is tragic and it can be coped with only by living it or doing away with it,” says Di Biase.
Many of Prisco’s novels are set in the post-World War II era, at a time when the brutality and violence of man was brought to the surface. By having his characters oftentimes trying to put themselves into a better social position with devastating results, he also uncovered the motives behind societal rituals and practices. Throughout the novels, his characters learn only to survive after confronting their own inner demons. Much of this is achieved through memories. Those characters that cannot confront their motivations end up tragically like Maddelena. For many in the literary world this probing of the inner mind, juxtaposed against societal positions, is Prisco’s strong point. “While... [Prisco’s] subsequent novels did show a gradual widening of the historical perspective, along with a new sense of the social reality of the postwar years, his main works of fiction - the novels Una spirale di nebbia (1966), which won the Strega Prize; 7 cieli della sera (1970); and Gli ermellini neri (1975) - focused again, with growing lucidity and slow but intense narrative pace, on the study of human nature as a consistent source for the portrayal of types and characters, on the complex world of family life, and on the moral decline of the provincial middle class,” notes A. Illiano in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century.
Prisco was a Roman Catholic.
Prisco was a Democrat.
The writer loved to spend his holidays in the house in Vico Equense, and affectionately called it "la Casarella."
On October 6, 1951, Prisco married Sarah Buonomo, and they had two daughters. After the marriage, the family moved to Naples, where Michele stayed until his death in 2003.