G. Melania Mazzucco

> When a thing has passed, what distinguishes it, in the reality of the present, from an illusion or a fantasy? Even if it once had an existence of its own, thereafter it will have none, save in memory . The author reconstructs the American story of her grandfather, Diamante, and of his love for a girl, Vita. In the early years of the twentieth century, poverty and despair drove Italians to emigrate to the United States. Diamante, eleven years old, and Vita, still a child, journeyed to New York to join her father. The sea voyage and the grueling life in the New World forged an indissoluble bond between them—one that, as so often happens, never managed to crystallize into an enduring and stable relationship. The narrative unfolds in three parts. In the first part, entitled *“The Line of Fire,”* the author recounts the arrival of the two children in America and describes, in grim, harsh, and at times harrowing pages, the Italian immigrant milieu. Squalor and violence predominate. The Italians struggle to survive and send a few coins back to Italy. For Diamante and Vita, there is also the specific context in which they are forced to live: the sordidness and greed of the girl’s father; his mistress, the sole maternal figure for Vita, yet despised precisely for driving a wedge between her and her real mother, who remained in Italy; and their fellow countrymen who, brutalized by hard labor, frequent the boarding house run by Vita’s father. It could easily be a Dickensian narrative or a Zolaesque realist novel: it is neither. The episodes unfold as if in a succession of nightmares, accursed reveries, outward projections of the author’s own existential anxieties. Over everything looms the damned city, whose depiction recalls—in the imagery deployed and its emphatic style—D’Annunzio’s *Città terribili*. This part of the novel concludes dramatically: Vita sets fire to her father’s mistress in an attempt to kill her. In the second part, *“The Road Home,”* Vita’s son, serving as an American soldier on the Italian front during the Second World War, retraces the search for Diamante and his family. We then find ourselves in the Italy of the 1950s, where Vita, now an affluent widow and an established woman, comes to Rome to meet Diamante and ask him to live together. She meets with a tacit refusal: it is too late. In the third part, *“The Trickle of Water,”* the scene shifts back to America with Diamante and Vita, still young, but by then estranged. Vita, for her part, has betrayed Diamante, prompting the youth to flee in an attempt to forget her. When he returns to New York to board a ship bound for Italy, he asks her whether she wishes to leave as well. Yet by now the two young people are too far apart, their worlds irrevocably detached: “I like America, I'm fine here,” Vita thinks. Yet is this story a reconstruction based on documents and accounts from the protagonists, or is it rather the fruit of the author’s imagination? Diamante undoubtedly existed, but he was a taciturn, reserved man who disclosed little about his life. Of the girl, Vita, the writer found no trace, not even after a meticulous search through the parish archives of her native village. Perhaps the love between Diamante and Vita is merely an ideal, a wistful yearning, a blurred photograph—much like the one the author imagines the two youths having taken of themselves. > Their faces were a hesitant, blurry halo, as if at the very last moment they had preferred not to be captured, not to surrender the unrepeatable instant they were living to a dead memory. Diamante was a flash of black. Vita a blot of white. Their features superimposed and indistinguishable, as though they belonged to a single person . The core premise of the book is compelling. To narrate Italian emigration through the love of two characters: a childhood romance perpetually pursued and never realized, for no discernible reason. It is a pity that this idea is developed without a genuine narrative plot, ultimately proving discursive and fragmented. The style—dense with parenthetical clauses, overburdened with vocabulary and imagery—fails to impart vitality and allure to the narrative, which consequently remains stranded among disparate literary genres: family chronicle, social novel, and the imaginative quest for an existential and emotional trajectory of one's own. Why skip it? The reading experience is tedious and often ponderous. It does little to illuminate the phenomenon of Italian emigration. The love between Diamante and Vita lingers suspended and indistinct, never truly engaging the reader.