Multi-threaded Roman fabric

Difficult to slot into any genre, The Vietri Project starts with a notion that will appeal to book-lovers. Every few weeks, a letter arrives at a bookstore in Berkeley, California, asking for a large collection of books to be shipped to a Giordano Vietri in Italy. There is no apparent pattern to the type of books or the genre. Gabriele, the newest employee at the store, is assigned to the task of hunting down the books and shipping them off.

He ended one of his responses, “Please kindly do not refer to me as ‘Professor’, as I am not.” He always addressed his letters, “Dear Sirs’, though no letter had ever been answered by anyone other than a woman, one of the store’s several female managers in their fifties. [..] The letters began to arrive with more detailed instructions, he wanted only paperback editions, if available, and if not available the cloth edition should cost no more than fifty US dollars. […] Every order came with an expiration date, six or seven months off, as if, though reading of immortality, he was keenly aware of his body’s temporal limitations.

Who is this mysterious man?

Gabriele is just out of university and at a loose end. She has a boyfriend but feels trapped, prodded towards a marriage she rejects. She leaves abruptly for months of wandering around South America and then

suddenly I’d run out of beach islands in Bahia […] and I wondered where there was left to go. So [..] I arrived at the Termini station in Rome, my body stiff from the overnight flight from Rio […] and thought that I might, as long as I was here, try to visit [Veitri’s] apartment on the via Bevanda.

So far the novel has been fairly focused: Gabriele’s erstwhile boyfriend and her wanderings in South America are briskly dealt with in a chapter. At this point the book seems to change in tone, and some of Gabriele’s background becomes clearer. Her mother is Italian, it turns out, and she spent several summers in Rome with a large extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins. But she is now strangely reluctant to throw herself back into that family web.

The writing is dense, but lovely, much like a beautiful, crowded city. It takes time and, often, a re-reading of a sentence or paragraph to parse out the implications. Gabriele’s father had spent two weeks in Rome with his Italian wife before their child was born:

Those two weeks made it worse, I know, when his wife of this city, of this family, vanished from him, though it had always been clear to me that he’d kept this love for Rome, and for my mother, estranged from him, and from herself, as she was.

Gabriele’s mother, it turns out, ‘vanished’ not physically but mentally, and is ‘estranged from herself’ because she developed schizophrenia in her twenties, and is now being cared for in a facility in Southern California. Gabriele is now in her twenties, and fears that she too might carry that gene. Is her obsession with Vietri an early symptom?

Or, the reader might wonder, are her meandering thoughts an indication of a fragile mind? Or is the author particularly good at reproducing the convoluted trains of thought that run through the minds of most of us?

This would seem enough for a novel, but there is so much more. The initial goal of meeting Signor Vietri and learning the background history of the curious book purchases is complicated, it turns out, and leads Gabriele into an exploration of Vietri’s past, and that of Italy itself. Via a combination of serendity and determination, she finds Vietri’s birthdate, and then his hometown, Aliano. This leads her to a memoir by a painter who was exiled there for his anti-fascist activities, and thence to the colonialist history of Italy in Libya and Ethiopia. And

never once was it mentioned that the painter was Jewish.

This is a lot, and I’ve only touched the surface here. The reader must be prepared to wander from topic to topic, sometimes delving into one at great depth, and then forgetting it completely as Gabriele’s focus moves elsewhere.

Intermingled with the Vietri research are descriptions of Gabriele’s days, her thoughts about the social interactions in hostel life, somewhat surreal stories of other hostel residents, and always, the overhanging cloud of her mother’s illness.

She begins to reach out to her family despite her fear of ‘the sticky ties that were already trying to pull me in’: first her cousin Andrea, close to her age, and then inevitably, the larger group. The commentary on cultural differences was beautifully done, woven into the fabric of Gabriele’s inner meandering:

My Roman family, especially of the older generations, acknowledged no boundaries between themselves, and it had been hard for me, I’d grown up with so much solitude, the only child in a suburban house and preoccupied parents. Their word for privacy was the English word, il privacy, my relatives had no native concept of it in the abstract.

The intermittent asides on Italian and English linguistics were fascinating.

I often couldn’t understand what Giancarlo and Laura were saying, not only because their Italian was so rapid and complex, more and more, I realized, my family, even my mother, must have been speaking to me in circumscribed Italian. […] My Italian had always been shaky, my first four or five years of life, when my multiplying brain synapses would have made the absorption of a second language fluid and easy, were “bad years” for my mother, and she’d lived with us infrequently.

This is not a novel for those who like closure. I am normally one of that group, but in this particular novel, the slow journey was pleasurable. Which is lucky, because few threads that emerge during the course of this book led to a clear destination.