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Paola Irene Galli Mastrodonato, Emilio Salgari: The Tiger Is Still Alive!, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2024. 462 pgs.

The very first thought that crossed my mind upon seeing Paola Irene Galli Mastrodonato’s 462-page tome was: Finally. It’s about time. The book, as the publisher’s description states, is indeed the first complete study of Italian novelist Emilio Salgari (1862–1911) to be published in English. If his name does not ring even the faintest of bells for today’s contemporary reader, comparative literature scholar Paola Irene Galli Mastrodonato makes a compelling case for why the international English-speaking community should know more about Salgari and his work—and why she considers him a visionary “postcolonial author ante litteram.”

Among Salgari’s numerous novels, two are set in China—Buddha’s Scimitar (1892) and The Tunnel of Death (1901). As far as I know, they have never been translated into Chinese or English. Perhaps they should be. For Galli Mastrodonato, “the role that China and the Chinese play in Emilio’s fiction is both relevant and surprising” and “it is mostly in the heroes and heroines of the Chinese diaspora that Emilio’s genius shines through.” She provides the example of Than-Kiù, protagonist of The Flower of the Pearls (1901), a novel about the Filipino insurrection against the Spanish colonisers. For Galli Mastrodonato, Than-Kiù overturns “commonly accepted stereotypes of Chinese women in Salgari’s times.” Unlike conventional depictions, Than-Kiù’s feet are not bound, she is not a young prostitute, she can ride a horse and shoot a rifle, and she has not been sold into an unwanted marriage.

Perhaps the country most present in the Italian imaginary of the Asian exotic is Malaysia. The tiger in the title of Galli Mastrodonato’s book refers to Sandokan, a freedom fighter also known as The Tiger of Malaysia—Salgari’s most famous anti-colonial hero, who fought James Brooke, the English Rajah of Sarawak. Although tigers were not native to Borneo, Salgari transformed this animal—so deeply embedded in Chinese and Indian mythology—into a symbol of resistance. And just like endangered tigers that require protection, Galli Mastrodonato has gone to great lengths to safeguard Salgari’s endangered literary reputation.

According to Galli Mastrodonato, Sandokan, in The Tigers of Mompracem (1900), “pronounces the most famous indictment against colonialism ever to appear in a work of fiction during the age of imperialism.” Sandokan declares to his Portuguese ally, Yanez:

It’s true [that they hate me], but whose fault is it? Is it not true that the men of the white race have shown no pity to me? Is it not true that they have dethroned me with the pretence that I was becoming too powerful? Is it not true that they have murdered my mother, my brothers, and my sisters to destroy my lineage? What evil had I done to them? The white race had nothing to complain of, and still they wanted to crush me. Now I hate them, whether Spanish or Dutch, whether English or Portuguese like your countrymen. I loathe them and I shall avenge myself awfully. I have sworn it over the dead bodies of my family, and I shall keep my oath!

The contemporary reader cannot help but draw parallels with plundered and occupied lands of today, where civilians are massacred for political or commercial gain. The reader may also be surprised to witness Sandokan’s more merciful side—realising that his pursuit of vengeance was not as ruthless as expected.

To grasp the sheer magnitude of Salgari’s literary output, Galli Mastrodonato presents the figures. Between 1894 and 1906, he produced 55 novels—fifty-five novels in twelve years, not counting those written before 1894 and after 1906. Who knows how many more he would have written had he not taken his own life? The distress of having his beloved wife, Aida, committed to a mental asylum, combined with the pressures of writing to support their children and the exploitative publishers who profited from his work while keeping him in poverty, took an inevitable toll on his mental health. This was despite the fact that, in 1897, he was knighted by the Italian Crown in recognition of his creative genius.

Aware of the critical biases that often accompany such prolific output, Galli Mastrodonato takes the reader on a journey through Salgari’s work. The chapters of her book are organised geographically—Southeast Asia, the Far East, the Americas (including the Caribbean), Africa, the poles, Australia and Oceania, and the Russian Empire. His novels span historical events such as the British occupation of Borneo, the independence of the Philippines, Mahdist Sudan, the Japanese-Russian conflict, and the Boxer Rebellion in China, even venturing into a futuristic vision of the United States in the year 2003.

While it is unusual, as Galli Mastrodonato notes, that none of Salgari’s stories are set in continental Europe, anyone interested in how a 19th-century European novelist from Verona depicted vast geopolitical realities should study his works. Engaging with Salgari’s literature also raises essential questions—how does he write about race, “natives,” violence, women, love, religion, and nature? What kind of Orientalism and feminism exist within his narratives? How are his love stories, so central to his plots, constructed?

A notable strength in Galli Mastrodonato’s book is her exposure of what she calls “a serious setback in postcolonial studies” that overlooks the counter-discourses embedded within ‘Western’ writing. This has led to the exclusion of a writer like Salgari—who wrote in Italian—from being recognised as an anti-colonial and, to some extent, feminist author, where both natives and women emerge as heroes.

Galli Mastrodonato also blames rigid genre criticism and poor critical readings of Salgari’s works for obscuring his reputation. Why classify him as a children’s writer, adventure novelist, or hack writer of swashbuckling feuilletons when Jules Verne, Joseph Conrad, James Fenimore Cooper, and R.L. Stevenson were not so rigidly confined? Chinua Achebe’s denunciation of Joseph Conrad’s racism never undermined Conrad’s place in the literary canon—yet Salgari, despite his immense popularity, was never even admitted into the respectable canon to begin with, leaving no space for serious or fair discussions about his portrayal of non-European peoples. Why emphasise the fact that Salgari never visited the places he wrote about as proof of his works’ inauthenticity, when Shakespeare never visited Verona either? That Galli Mastrodonato discusses Salgari alongside other great canonical writers underscores how essential the comparative method is in re-evaluating and salvaging the reputations of overlooked authors.

Emilio Salgari: The Tiger Is Still Alive! is an engaging read—one that at times mirrors an adventure novel, transporting readers from one exotic locale to another. Galli Mastrodonato’s occasional autobiographical asides—about her experiences in Nairobi or Tehran—illustrate how Salgari, more than a century later, has found a reader uniquely equipped to engage with his work from both an insider Italian and an outsider worldly perspective. With this book, she has sought to rescue Salgari from oblivion, restoring him to world literature.

After reading Galli Mastrodonato’s book, one would be well-equipped to take a quiz with questions such as: Who invented the first Malay anti-colonial hero in European literature? Who was Italy’s pioneer of science fiction? Which author was read in their youth by Umberto Eco, Antonio Gramsci, Cesare Pavese, Octavio Paz, Che Guevara, Jorge Luis Borges, Sergio Leone, and Pier Paolo Pasolini? Who transformed the Vietnamese Tay-See and the Sioux Minnehaha into strong literary heroines with agency? Who is considered the grandfather of the Spaghetti Western? Who created the first secular Muslim hero in Italian literature? Who ranks as the fourth most translated Italian author, following Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Dante? The answer to all these questions would be a resounding “Emilio Salgari.”

We are all creatures of our time. Yet, if a writer like Emilio Salgari could offer us something beyond the prevailing worldview of his era, we should have confidence that our own epoch has—and will continue to produce—progressive, visionary writers. In this sense, the resisting tiger will always live on, as Galli Mastrodonato’s lengthy labour of love compels us to believe.

^{Emilio Salgari}

How to cite: Alatas, Masturah. “Asia’s Italian Novelist: Paola Irene Galli Mastrodonato.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 13 Feb. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/02/13/tiger.

Masturah Alatas is a Singapore-born writer and educator who has been living in Italy since 1992. She is the author of The Life in the Writing (Gerakbudaya, 2024) and the novella The Girl Who Made It Snow in Singapore (Ethos Books, 2008). Her work has appeared alongside that of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, and Susan Abulhawa in the anthology Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Climate Change (2017). Her short fiction has been longlisted for the Lingua Madre Prize (2006), MMU Novella Award (2016), and Cambridge Short Story Prize (2018), and in 2021, she won Singapore Unbound’s first flash fiction prize. In addition to English, Masturah has published short fiction and essays on Emilio Salgari in Italian, making her the first Malaysian writer to do so. She currently teaches English and Translation at the University of Macerata, a city known as the birthplace of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610)—the Jesuit priest and scholar who carried out missionary work in China and contributed to cross-cultural translation, rendering Latin and Greek classics into Chinese and Confucian texts into Latin.