Powerful events shape a family
By Louisa Thomas |
March 31, 2013, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IT'S tempting to invest the remnants of the past - the letters, the heirlooms, the junk - with tremendous explanatory power, especially when the stuff is your family's. The cliche about the dustbin of history is almost too apt when Alexander Stille walks into his aunt Lally's apartment. Buried in the stacks of clothes, receipts, lottery tickets and old balls of yarn, there are fantastic photographs, a letter from the proto-Fascist poet Gabriele d'Annunzio and all the living room furniture Lally's parents had taken with them when the family fled Russia for Italy and then Italy for the US.
Stille had come to his aunt's apartment to unearth the archive of family documents hidden in the piles of trash, documents that would help him understand the story of how his father's family survived "the major tragedies of 20th-century Europe: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Fascist revolution, the racial laws, World War II." But the trash itself also strikes him as part of the record.
In Lally's inability to throw things away, Stille sees not just psychosis but the workings of history. "This mess was the expression of a world of darkness, despair and irrational pain, the fearful holding on to everything as a bulwark against everything that was lost."
Stille also sees larger forces at work in his Midwestern mother's desire to attack the grime in Lally's apartment. "She came from and aspired to a world of light, order and progress - the New Deal."
In this capacious, frank and warmhearted memoir, Stille, a journalist and the author of several books about Italy, has a number of ambitions. He wants to reconstruct the two very different life stories of his mother and father, which he does with a trove of letters, newspapers and conversations with his parents. He also wants to understand the dynamics of their fractious marriage and how their fights, insults, affairs, prejudices and, ultimately, stamina affected his own development and attitudes.
Finally, he wants to say something about larger historical narratives.
"Our lives have meaning - above and beyond our individual qualities - because we are part of and express the times in which we live," he writes.
Stille is a thoughtful and lively writer, but his aims are sometimes at cross-purposes. And he has a tendency to flatten his parents' experiences and to present their personalities in binary terms.
To his credit, Stille seems aware of this and feels guilty about turning people he knew and loved (and resented) into characters and caricatures. But although he acknowledges this anxiety, he intimates he had no choice.
The most powerful relationships in the book got caught up in the times, but also transcended them. The force of things was strong. The force of people was stronger.
Stille had come to his aunt's apartment to unearth the archive of family documents hidden in the piles of trash, documents that would help him understand the story of how his father's family survived "the major tragedies of 20th-century Europe: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Fascist revolution, the racial laws, World War II." But the trash itself also strikes him as part of the record.
In Lally's inability to throw things away, Stille sees not just psychosis but the workings of history. "This mess was the expression of a world of darkness, despair and irrational pain, the fearful holding on to everything as a bulwark against everything that was lost."
Stille also sees larger forces at work in his Midwestern mother's desire to attack the grime in Lally's apartment. "She came from and aspired to a world of light, order and progress - the New Deal."
In this capacious, frank and warmhearted memoir, Stille, a journalist and the author of several books about Italy, has a number of ambitions. He wants to reconstruct the two very different life stories of his mother and father, which he does with a trove of letters, newspapers and conversations with his parents. He also wants to understand the dynamics of their fractious marriage and how their fights, insults, affairs, prejudices and, ultimately, stamina affected his own development and attitudes.
Finally, he wants to say something about larger historical narratives.
"Our lives have meaning - above and beyond our individual qualities - because we are part of and express the times in which we live," he writes.
Stille is a thoughtful and lively writer, but his aims are sometimes at cross-purposes. And he has a tendency to flatten his parents' experiences and to present their personalities in binary terms.
To his credit, Stille seems aware of this and feels guilty about turning people he knew and loved (and resented) into characters and caricatures. But although he acknowledges this anxiety, he intimates he had no choice.
The most powerful relationships in the book got caught up in the times, but also transcended them. The force of things was strong. The force of people was stronger.
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