Historical context and plots
The novel presents a vast multitude of characters and sub-plots.
It's 1954, Joseph Stalin is dead, Yugoslavia is the only socialist country to have broken relationships with the Soviet Union, and the Free Territory of Trieste is contended between Italy and her bordering neighbor country. In Italy, dissatisfaction is widespread among former members of the Resistance, as the Christian Democrat government has allowed many top figures of the Fascist regime to re-enter public and institutional life, and several former partisans are being persecuted as their guerrilla activities are taken out of their context and regarded as criminal actions. In Naples, mob boss Lucky Luciano is supervising the creation of the global heroin trade. In Italian Communist Party-controlled Bologna, a group of grumpy communists hang out at the Bar Aurora. The place is run by the young Capponi Brothers, whose father fought in Yugoslavia and decided to stay there after the war.
In the US, Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunt has reached its peak. In Hollywood, Cary Grant is utterly bored with his new life after retiring from his career as a movie star. Both Alfred Hitchcock and MI6 are trying to convince him to return to acting. While Hitchcock's proposal is precise and sharply focused – the master of suspense is preparing the filming of To Catch a Thief – MI6's is vague and implausible: Grant is supposed to travel to Yugoslavia and meet up with President Josip Broz Tito, to discuss the Marshal's willingness to co-operate with the western movie industry. MI6 reckon that a biopic on Tito's leading role in the Balkan Resistance would be a good weapon of psychological warfare on the USSR.
A key role in the parallel unfolding of these sub-plots is played by an American television set, a McGuffin Electric DeLuxe which is stolen from an Allied military base in Southern Italy, sold on the black market and then passed from one buyer to the next as no-one is able to make it work. "McGuffin" is a real, sentient character, the authors address him as a "he" and follow "his" stream of consciousness throughout the book, as he reasons about the rough way the Italians are treating him.
Contemporary context and interpretations
Background research for the book began in 1999, after the publication of the group's previous novel Q . Plots were outlined in the aftermath of the Kosovo War. Actual writing work ended ten days after the 11 September attacks, on the eve of the war in Afghanistan. These two wars are explicitly referred to in the novel's End Titles: "Begun in May 1999, during the Nato bombings of Belgrade. Delivered to the Italian publishers on 21 September 2001, awaiting the escalation."
The events leading to (and following) 11 September are also allegorically described in the book's forenote:
"Post-war" means nothing.
What fools called "peace" simply meant moving away from the front.
Fools defended peace by supporting the armed wing of money.
Beyond the next dune the clashes continued. The fangs of chimerical beasts sinking into flesh, the heavens full of steel and smoke, whole cultures uprooted from the earth.
Fools fought the enemies of today by bankrolling those of tomorrow.
Fools swelled their chests, talked of "freedom", "democracy", "in our country", as they devoured the fruits of riots and looting.
They were defending civilisation against Chinese shadows of dinosaurs.
They were defending the planet against fake images of asteroids.
They were defending the Chinese shadow of a civilisation.
They were defending the fake image of a planet.
(translated by Shaun Whiteside)
The Observer wrote that 54 is a skilled book "about narcotics, the cheap potency of Hollywood, the coming of television, the balance of political power, and how the effects knock on down the line" [1]
Red Pepper magazine noted that the book contains a "mockery of Berlusconi's media and political excesses" [2]
According to The Independent , the novel tries to "explain how Europe's postwar quest for social justice was thwarted by rampant consumerism and a surrender to American power" [3]
The novel has also been seen as an elegy for the shattered dreams of the Resistance movement, as well as a depiction of everyday life after the failure of a revolution. [4]
In a 2008 speech given at Middlebury College, VT, Wu Ming 1 described the forenote to 54 as an "encrypted guide" to the poetics and allegories underlying many literary works produced in Italy in recent years, a heterogeneous narrative current which he called "New Italian Epic". [5]
Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito, was a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and politician who served in various positions of national leadership from 1943 until his death in 1980. During World War II, he led the Yugoslav Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in German-occupied Europe. He also served as prime minister from 2 November 1944 to 29 June 1963 and president of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 14 January 1953 until his death. His political ideology and policies are known as Titoism.
Yugoslavia was a country in Southeast and Central Europe that existed from 1918 to 1992.
In fiction, a MacGuffin is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself. The term was originated by Angus MacPhail for film, adopted by Alfred Hitchcock, and later extended to a similar device in other fiction.
In Albania, World War II began with its invasion by Italy in April 1939. Fascist Italy set up Albania as its protectorate or puppet state. The resistance was largely carried out by Communist groups against the Italian and then German occupation in Albania. At first independent, the Communist groups united in the beginning of 1942, which ultimately led to the successful liberation of the country in 1944.
Titoism is a socialist political philosophy most closely associated with Josip Broz Tito during the Cold War. It is characterized by a broad Yugoslav identity, socialist workers' self-management, a political separation from the Soviet Union, and leadership in the Non-Aligned Movement.
Q is a novel by Luther Blissett first published in Italian in 1999. The novel is set in Europe during the 16th century, and deals with Protestant reformation movements.
Milovan Djilas was a Yugoslav communist politician, theorist and author. He was a key figure in the Partisan movement during World War II, as well as in the post-war government. A self-identified democratic socialist, Djilas became one of the best-known and most prominent dissidents in Yugoslavia and all of Eastern Europe. During an era of several decades, he critiqued communism from the viewpoint of trying to improve it from within; after the revolutions of 1989 and the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, he critiqued it from an anti-communist viewpoint of someone whose youthful dreams had been disillusioned.
A useful idiot or useful fool is a person who thinks they are fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions, and who is cynically manipulated by the cause's leaders or by other political players. The term was often used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and psychological manipulation. A number of authors attribute this phrase to Vladimir Lenin, but this attribution is not supported by any evidence. Similar terms exist in other languages.
The Yugoslav Partisans, or the National Liberation Army, officially the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, was the communist-led anti-fascist resistance to the Axis powers in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. Led by Josip Broz Tito, the Partisans are considered to be Europe's most effective anti-Axis resistance movement during World War II.
The League of Communists of Yugoslavia, known until 1952 as the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, was the founding and ruling party of SFR Yugoslavia. It was formed in 1919 as the main communist opposition party in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and after its initial successes in the elections, it was proscribed by the royal government and was at times harshly and violently suppressed. It remained an illegal underground group until World War II when, after the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the military arm of the party, the Yugoslav Partisans, became embroiled in a bloody civil war and defeated the Axis powers and their local auxiliaries. After the liberation from foreign occupation in 1945, the party consolidated its power and established a one-party state, which existed in that form of government until 1990, a year prior to the start of the Yugoslav Wars and breakup of Yugoslavia.
During World War II, resistance movements operated in German-occupied Europe by a variety of means, ranging from non-cooperation to propaganda, hiding crashed pilots and even to outright warfare and the recapturing of towns. In many countries, resistance movements were sometimes also referred to as The Underground.
Wu Ming, Chinese for "anonymous", is a pseudonym for a group of Italian authors formed in 2000 from a subset of the Luther Blissett community in Bologna. Four of the group earlier wrote the novel Q. Unlike the open name "Luther Blissett", "Wu Ming" stands for a defined group of writers active in literature and popular culture. The band authored several novels, some of which have been translated in many countries.
The Tito–Stalin split or the Soviet–Yugoslav split was the culmination of a conflict between the political leaderships of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, under Josip Broz Tito and Joseph Stalin, respectively, in the years following World War II. Although presented by both sides as an ideological dispute, the conflict was as much the product of a geopolitical struggle in the Balkans that also involved Albania, Bulgaria, and the communist insurgency in Greece, which Tito's Yugoslavia supported and the Soviet Union secretly opposed.
World War II in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia began on 6 April 1941, when the country was invaded and swiftly conquered by Axis forces and partitioned among Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and their client regimes. Shortly after Germany attacked the USSR on 22 June 1941, the communist-led republican Yugoslav Partisans, on orders from Moscow, launched a guerrilla liberation war fighting against the Axis forces and their locally established puppet regimes, including the Axis-allied Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and the Government of National Salvation in the German-occupied territory of Serbia. This was dubbed the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution in post-war Yugoslav communist historiography. Simultaneously, a multi-side civil war was waged between the Yugoslav communist Partisans, the Serbian royalist Chetniks, the Axis-allied Croatian Ustaše and Home Guard, Serbian Volunteer Corps and State Guard, Slovene Home Guard, as well as Nazi-allied Russian Protective Corps troops.
The Macedonian Partisans, officially the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Macedonia, was a communist and anti-fascist resistance movement formed in occupied Yugoslavia which was active in World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia. Units of the army were formed by Macedonians within the framework of the Yugoslav Partisans as well as other communist resistance organisations operating in Macedonia at the time and were led by the General Staff of the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Macedonia, headed by Mihajlo Apostolski.
Ante Ciliga was a Croatian politician, writer and publisher. Ciliga was one of the earliest leaders of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). Imprisoned in Stalin's Gulags in the 1930s as part of the Great Purge, he later became an ardent Croatian nationalist, anti-communist and ideologue of the fascist Ustaše movement.
In 1941 when the Axis invaded Yugoslavia, King Peter II formed a Government in exile in London, and in January 1942 the royalist Draža Mihailović became the Minister of War with British backing. But by June or July 1943, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had decided to withdraw support from Mihailović and the Chetniks he led, and support the Partisans headed by Josip Broz Tito, even though this would result in "complete communist control of Serbia". The main reason for the change was not the reports by Fitzroy Maclean or William Deakin, or as later alleged the influence of James Klugmann in Special Operations Executive (SOE) headquarters in Cairo or even Randolph Churchill, but the evidence of Ultra decrypts from the Government Code and Cipher School in Bletchley Park that Tito's Partisans were a "much more effective and reliable ally in the war against Germany". Nor was it due to claims that the Chetniks were collaborating with the enemy, though there was some evidence from decrypts of collaboration with Italian and sometimes German forces.
The Greek Civil War took place from 1946 to 1949. The conflict, which erupted shortly after the end of World War II, consisted of a communist-dominated uprising against the established government of the Kingdom of Greece. The opposition declared a people's republic, the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece, which was governed by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and its military branch, the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE). The rebels were supported by Albania and Yugoslavia. With the support of the United Kingdom and United States, the Greek government forces ultimately prevailed.
The Slovene Partisans, formally the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Slovenia, were part of Europe's most effective anti-Nazi resistance movement led by Yugoslav revolutionary communists during World War II, the Yugoslav Partisans. Since a quarter of Slovene ethnic territory and approximately 327,000 out of total population of 1.3 million Slovenes were subjected to forced Italianization since the end of the First World War, the objective of the movement was the establishment of the state of Slovenes that would include the majority of Slovenes within a socialist Yugoslav federation in the postwar period.
World War II in the Slovene Lands started in April 1941 and lasted until May 1945. The Slovene Lands were in a unique situation during World War II in Europe. In addition to being trisected, a fate which also befell Greece, Drava Banovina was the only region that experienced a further step—absorption and annexation into neighboring Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Hungary. The Slovene-settled territory was divided largely between Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, with smaller territories occupied and annexed by Hungary and the Independent State of Croatia.
