Book Reviews

THREE DREAMERS

By Lorenzo Carcaterra

“When success finally found its way to my door, she was the only one not surprised by its arrival.” With these eloquent words that author Lorenzo Carcaterra pens about his late wife, it is very easy for readers to see within the first handful of pages that Three Dreamers is a memoir in which they will become immersed.

Three Dreamers is Carcaterra’s homage to the three women who affected his life in indelible ways, leading him to become a bestselling novelist and live out his dream of earning a living as a writer, a feat that so few manage to achieve.

The first woman, his grandmother Maria, will take you on a trip to the island of Ischia, twenty miles off the coast of Naples. The second woman, his mother Raffaela, will take you on a trip through suffering and heartbreak in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York City. The third woman, his late wife Susan, will take you on a trip through a love story that shows the importance of having a counterpart who is your biggest champion.

At times romantic, at other times severe and tragic, the journey that Carcaterra takes you on offers no exaggeration or sugarcoating. What Carcaterra has written contains uninhibited honesty and truth about the abuse he endured and how those three women helped him make it to the other side.

And in that, you will find that only a resilient person could experience the success Carcaterra has had as a writer. One whose mother once told him, “The doors to a better life for people like us are always closed. We have to push against them again and again until they open.”

DID YOU KNOW?

Ischia’s biggest celebration of the year is the Feast of Saint Anne on July 26. “God made us with our eyes in front for a reason! That’s the direction we need to look in. Otherwise he’d have put them on the side, like fish!”

I’M STAYING HERE

By Marco Balzano

Set in the South Tyrol, which was originally a part of Austria, Marco Balzano’s novel introduces readers to the lesser-known Trentino-South Tyrol region. The story takes place during the 1920s when Mussolini and his Blackshirts seize control of the area, turning it from a German-speaking land to an Italian-speaking land overnight.

Much of the plot revolves around the unfortunate and powerless situations that common folks encountered both individually and collectively. One of the central themes, which recently appeared in news headlines around the world, focuses on the erection of a dam and subsequent submersion of the town, Curon.

Written in pleasant minimalistic prose, I’m Staying Here is narrated by an older woman, Trina, who recounts how her family’s simple farm life and little town were torn apart by these times and Mussolini’s colonization. She describes a refugee’s dilemma, as some remained in the town while others fled north to Germany at Hitler’s invitation to join the Third Reich, referred to as “The Great Option.”

As Trina’s family carries on through a fractured existence, they must then face the uninterrupted transition from Fascism to Nazism once Mussolini is deposed. Initially, the Germans are viewed as liberators of South Tyrol. This perspective quickly shifts, and the townspeople are left to persevere a war that will leave them and their land ravaged and with a mixed identity.

It’s with this mixture that South Tyrol exists to this day. What Balzano brings forth in this novel is an origin to and the development of this Italian region’s multiple identity, which has evolved to create something beautiful out of a time that was ugly.