영어로 읽는 고전 _ 가브리엘레 단눈치오의 침입자
가브리엘레 단눈치오의 “침입자”는 19세기 말에 쓰인 소설입니다. 이야기는 툴리오 에르밀을 중심으로 전개되며, 그는 배신과 불륜, 그리고 자유와 연결에 대한 불안한 욕망으로 점철된 아내 줄리아나와의 복잡하고 격동적인 관계와 씨름합니다. 작품은 사랑, 죄책감, 그리고 인간 감정의 이중성이라는 주제를 깊이 파고들며, 독자로 하여금 개인적이고 낭만적인 갈등의 심연을 탐구하도록 이끕니다. 소설의 서두는 툴리오 에르밀이 자신의 격동적인 삶과 스스로도 온전히 이해하지 못하는 죄를 되돌아보는 장면으로 시작됩니다. 우리는 그가 자신의 과거 불륜과 그것이 아내 줄리아나에게 남긴 감정적 상처를 되짚는 내성적인 순간 속으로 곧장 던져집니다. 툴리오가 애정과 후회의 기억 사이를 오가는 동안, 그의 깊은 자기중심주의와 파괴적인 욕망의 본질이 서서히 드러납니다. 정절, 정체성, 그리고 자신의 행동이 불러올 결과에 대한 물음과 씨름하는 그의 모습 속에서 긴장감이 고조되며, 이는 사랑과 상실에 대한 깊은 심리적 탐구의 서막을 알립니다. 이 서두는 그의 열정과 아내를 향한 의무감 사이의 갈등을 중심으로 이야기가 펼쳐질 것임을 암시합니다.
Classics Read in English _ The Intruder by Gabriele D'Annunzio
The Intruder is a late nineteenth-century novel that places D'Annunzio firmly in the territory of psychological fiction — intimate, claustrophobic, and deeply unsettling. At its center is Tullio Hermil, a man who is neither villain nor victim but something more troubling than either: a man of genuine feeling and genuine moral failure, unable to fully reckon with what he has done or what he continues to do. His relationship with his wife Juliana is the novel's dark heart — fractured by infidelity, haunted by guilt, and held together by a bond that is part love, part obsession, and part the sheer inertia of two lives entangled beyond easy separation. D'Annunzio uses Tullio's interior world to probe the most uncomfortable corners of human emotion — desire, remorse, egotism, and the desperate human need to be both free and forgiven.
The novel opens in medias res, inside Tullio's head, where it will largely remain. He is a man mid-reflection, circling a crime he cannot quite name, let alone explain. His past infidelities rise to the surface of his consciousness not with the clarity of confession but with the murk of self-justification — and it is in that murk that D'Annunzio finds his richest material. We watch Tullio move through memories of tenderness and betrayal, catching glimpses of the man he might have been alongside the man he actually is. Beneath the introspection runs a cold current of narcissism — the sense that even his guilt is, at some level, a form of self-regard.
Questions of fidelity, identity, and consequence coil through these opening pages like a slow-tightening spring, and the tension D'Annunzio builds is not the tension of plot but of psychology — the unbearable pressure of a man standing at the edge of what he is capable of, not yet sure how far he will go. It is a masterful, deeply unsettling opening to one of his most psychologically penetrating works.
Among the contents
My first recollection is as follows:
By this, when I began this narrative, I meant: "Among my recollections this is the first in any way connected with the frightful thing."
It was, therefore, in April. We had been at the Badiola for several days.
"Ah! my children," my mother had said, with her unceremonious candor, "how pale you both look! Oh! that Rome, that Rome. To put some color in your cheeks you must stay in the country with me for a long, long time."
"Yes," Juliana had answered, with a smile; "yes, mother, we will stay as long as you wish."
That smile often appeared on Juliana's lips when my mother was by. And, although her eyes invariably retained their melancholy, that smile was so sweet, so profoundly kind, that I permitted even myself to be deceived by it. I dared now to entertain some hope.
