Stepping Stones Reveal a Path into Italy's Dark History -- for PBS site

Writing stories culled from your travels is a dream assignment. I rarely get paid to do it! But in this case I did, and what's more, the topic is tied to the work I do as a literary translator.

For the PBS website, Next Avenue, I wrote about tiny public memorials to victims of the Holocaust and other targets of the Nazi-Fascist forces. These memorials are copper-plated cobblestones embedded in the streets of Italy, Germany and other countries. I learned about the stepping stones while researching Italian women writers -- and others -- who have borne witness to the Holocaust.

And last summer while I was in Italy, I was able to visit some of these stones in Rome, Milan and Florence. 

The stones in some ways are a paradox: tiny but powerful, open to the public at all hours for free but especially poignant when you're able to do some additional research. Under foot -- which some object to -- but also in the way, in your face, in a way that supporters like. You can't avoid this historical moment -- it's right under your foot.

You can read the piece here:

https://www.nextavenue.org/stepping-stones-reveal-italys-dark-history/

Leo's Coronavirus Journal

Well, it's not really his Coronavirus Journal -- it's an excerpt of my own journal that features pithy comments from Leo.

May 12, 2020

Leo is learning about poetry this week and will even have to write two poems. Out for a walk, we’re discussing the types of poems he’s studying and suddenly he says, “What kind of poem is the one by Sean O’Casey? Where he says, ‘An I assed meself, what is the stars?’”

THIS REALLY HAPPENED.

It shows he’s reading the walls of our house since that's where we have the famous poster about Irish writers, which features 12 quotations (including the one from O'Casey). But still! My 7-year-old American son said the name ‘Sean O’Casey.’

We then went back to my parents' house to study their version of the poster. Truth: as often as I looked at the poster, I never actually studied the rhymes in the quotations! Never studied the meter! And there we were counting syllables in a poem by Sean O’Casey. 

LITERATURE IS REAL. 

And...

WE ARE ALL POETRY PEOPLE when we start out reading.

August 9, 2020

Leo picks up a long, curved stick, and says, “This could be a good steering wheel for animals.”

Nov 2. 2020

Leo: “Your brain is like a library.”

Nov. 3, 2020

Leo and I talk a lot about fur. What’s lined with fur. Like sweatpants and hoodies. When he calls something “super furry,” my brain becomes cozy. I yearn for all things furry. And I’m thankful for this lovely little boy who makes lovely little observations. 

What I'm reading? Often Modiano

Yep, I read a lot of Patrick Modiano -- thank God he is so prolific!

So I figured why not review his latest work from Yale University Press?

It's not his best, as I say in this review below for Cleaver Magazine, a lit mag based in Philadelphia and run by some fellow Bennington Writing Seminar alums, but you won't regret reading it (and in the review I tell you which books to seek out, including the title in the picture).

Here's a link to the full review:

https://www.cleavermagazine.com/scene-of-the-crime-a-novel-by-patrick-modianom-reviewed-by-jeanne-bonner/

As I mention in the review, the action in Scene of the Crime revolves around a character called Jean Bosmans who stumbles upon a series of coincidences involving his childhood home and a group of shady individuals who are alarmingly interested in his past.

The plot is par for the course for this French Nobel Laureate who has dedicated his literary career to exhuming the ghosts of wartime Paris through semi-autobiographical fiction.

The plot is also beside the point—and in some ways, I love that.

Nearly all of Modiano’s works touch on memory and childhood, as the author pieces together fictionalized episodes with his father, a shadowy figure who was on the run during World War II because of his Jewish heritage and willing to get his hands dirty to stay free. Born in 1945, Modiano has trained his gaze permanently on the war years that immediately preceded his birth, and the post-war years that are often referred to as the Thirty Glorious Years. As Alice Kaplan noted in a 2017 article for the Paris Review, Modiano likes to say he “is a child of the war.” She quotes him as saying: “Faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves.”

Modiano has been accused of writing the same book over and over. Many writers have been the subject of such an accusation and it’s probably true, but few are as magnanimous about it. Indeed, Modiano has admitted it during interviews, perhaps because he doesn’t see it as an insult or a problem.

Similarly, I enjoy reading his work because I'm always hoping he will add to the portrait he's been building of his father. And of course he always does. Sometimes more satisfactorily, sometimes less so.

But he's sifting through the wreckage of memories, and using fiction to uncover something that's even truer than fact.

I enjoy Modiano so much that I've begun reading one of his books in French -- desperately relying on knowledge I stored up for the most part back in Junior High School! I keep the English translation in my lap and refer to it every other sentence -- what passes for fun in my world.

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Coronavirus Journal, three years later

A publisher put out a call a while back for Coronavirus diary entries and I happily obliged since, of course, I'd been writing in my journal during those initial dark, confused days. I've heard nothing from the publication so I am publishing the entries here. In our particular corner of the world -- by which I mean, the Bonner sisters and their families -- we were simultaneously handling the initial phase of my father's decline. It feels individual and unique and yet I have the sensation so many of us were juggling two problems -- two pandemics, as it were. The wider emergency of Covid taking over the planet, and the personal imprint of a local tragedy, complicated by the restrictions and the terror of those early pandemic days.

March 25, 2020

Leo yesterday had a Zoom meeting with his teacher. The same Zoom software I am using to teach my class at Wesleyan, except it’s not actually at Wesleyan anymore.

He’s above average in reading and he likes Math a lot so perhaps we are lucky in some ways because I don’t fear he will miss out on as much.

Nonetheless, a part of me grieves that he’s been robbed of the fundamental social nature of school, particularly as an only child.

Yet I am always of two minds. I mean, quite literally always -- before coronavirus and probably since I was born. (Or) I think of it as an occupational hazard as a journalist.

He should be in school, but in my home school, he can rock in his chair or even slump (for a while at least). He can stand up to do math problems, and he can walk around the computer room on the third floor while he explains fables to me. Oh, and we have gym every day, multiple times a day.

And yet – the other mind weighing in again – he has not played with a friend in a week.

March 27, 2020

My coronavirus diary walks side by side with my Daddy-Is-Sick journal. I spoke with him yesterday and it was not the same person I knew. It was like talking to a hybrid of Mommy and an exhausted Daddy. He kept repeating certain key details of his fluid transfusion – that it took four-and-a-half hours hours, for example. He told me there are good days and bad, and the bad ones are when he wants to pull the blanket over his head. What was yesterday, I asked? A pull-the-blanket-over-your-head kind of day.

When I like to write

I like to write in the morning after a fractured night’s sleep has left me feeling so emotionally fragile it feels like a form of grief. I’m overcome and on the verge of tears, and my brain suddenly alights on a thought, then 10 thoughts, then 100. The words quickly filling my mind need a space to live. Feelings I left festering under the surface emerge and demand to be heard. I’m running on adrenaline, and at my wit’s end, and too tired to be careful. What makes me ache, what tortures me, what I truly think comes pouring out. I confess that I feel as though I am in mourning at fall’s first warnings, when the sudden chill in the morning air is so jarring since until yesterday, there was nothing but heavy, humid air mugging my every breath. Or I whisper to the journal I keep in my car, “I think I’m losing my fingerprints.”

I wrote this gush of words above after beginning a graduate writing program in my early 40s. I was finally attempting to fulfill my third-grade teacher’s prediction that I would be a writer when I grew up. Trying my hand at fiction for the first time, I had the zeal of a convert. I’d deferred my writing dreams (and my vague grad school plans) for so long, I never thought I’d be someone who lived to write. Then a series of unforeseen events – motherhood in my late 30s, among other things -- lead me to the magic door. I found the more I wrote, the more I wanted to write – like an itch you keep scratching or better yet, a lover you can’t stop kissing. If I showed up to write, I would write, then write a little more. Later after I’d taken a pause, a new thought might occur to me and I would race to my laptop to record it.

In the early days of this writing frenzy, which began during my maternity leave, I convinced myself it was all tied to breastfeeding and post-pregnancy hormones. (My true religion is a combination of Catholic guilt and jinx theory.) Plus, writing felt magical, too good to be true. I feared it would all disappear once I ceased to nurse and my body went back to its old self.

When this pessimist’s fantasy lifted, I found I wanted to write fairly often; some days, every spare minute. Not that every day produced the same kind of writing or quantity. Oh no.

So while writing after a night of broken sleep unleashes in me highly emotional, highly unstructured thoughts, writing after I’ve had eight hours of solid slumber produces an excess of energy that converts my mind into a trampoline, and I find myself revising multiple pieces in one sitting, organizing notes for a future piece and gathering details on, say, a fellowship for writers. I’m full of wonder and confidence; I have something to prove and I want to fight – on the page.

(Note to young writers: Sleep is cool if it allows you to go wild in your writing).

Running very little very often

I have a photo of myself and my son that became instantly beloved to me the moment I saw it.

He’s on his bike and I’m chasing after him, in a bid to keep up with him -- and keep an eye on him. We’ve come to the Beltline, the rails-to-trails economic development project that’s remaking Atlanta, where we once lived.

I’m dressed in tight jeans and black sandals with hard wooden soles; my hands are gripping my pocketbook and a cell phone. I’m not, in other words, dressed to run. But I am running full-on -- and reveling in the moment.

We’re a blur in motion, we’re laughing, we're alive; need I say more? The photo means more than the plaque I received at a 5K race in my neighborhood after finishing second in my age group.

As the mother of an elementary school-aged boy, I probably run more now than ever before. Running isn’t something I do occasionally – it’s woven now, in small doses, into my life.

My go-to sport and exercise regimen leans more toward lap swimming, and I love simply to walk. I also sometimes bike and paddleboard. But running is so simple, so low on equipment and preparation, that for me it’s like the exercise you pull out of your back pocket as needed. In a new city? Go for a run to map the place out. Can’t get to the gym? Run around the block a few times. Trapped in a cycle of insomnia because you’ve moved cross-country to start a new life in Connecticut? Run in circles behind your house, in the cool, green fields of a private school on your new street. (For example).

I don't run great distances. I don't even run not-so-great distances. I run very short distances.

But it doesn’t mean I’m not serious about running. I am serious about keeping running a constant, if not huge, part of my life. If for no other reason than it makes me feel like I am six years old again, and being six has a lot to recommend for itself.

Often when I’ve run over the past five years, it’s behind my son’s bike, like the scene in the photo. I have to keep up with him, and I relish a chance to be with him while also exercising.

No, it’s not like training for a 5K, or a half-marathon and it certainly isn’t elegant. But it’s running in its pure form, which is to say how we first learned to run as children. Their bodies start moving rapidly without any reason, without checking if they have the right gear on, and in a few seconds, they are engulfed by the euphoria running seems to singlehandedly bestow. My son and his friends run because they want to arrive at the next moment, at the next opportunity for joy, at the next post in life, as soon as possible. What better reason to run? So I copy them – because I, too, want in on this surefire path to smiles and laughter and joy.

As for races, they’re constantly being staged on a spontaneous basic. A few months ago, my son challenged me to a series of races in the school fields behind our house. Each race was a little bit longer – and one race was designated a “jogging-only” course. Do I let him win? I often do but not before running flat-out my fastest (then easing up). I mean, I am sprinting across that field like I am trying out for the Olympics.

I began doing that five years ago when my son turned five and his running sped up. He challenged me to a race on the sidewalk in front of our lilac Victorian in Atlanta, and all of a sudden, I was pouring on the power in a way I hadn’t in decades. I was back at my Long Island elementary school, competing in the 50-yard dash near the end of the school year, and I was joyfully passing classmates even while huffing and puffing around the makeshift track.

I cannot say what my neighbors might have thought, seeing me sprint across the sidewalk toward the corner. I wasn’t play-jogging as many parents do. I was in it to win it. And it felt glorious.

There have been so many days like that since he was born. Days where the highlights come when I’m getting some exercise with my son. I competed in gymnastics growing up and exercise somewhat regularly, but I have never been a jock. Nonetheless I’d always intuited, even if I didn’t fully exploit the notion, that exercise can change our days, and our lives -- literally. Now I try to work up a sweat when I can, including kicking the soccer ball around our small yard over and over (it’s running, just with a ball). And I don’t care how I look or who sees me or where I am when I begin running. With a son who runs at the drop of a hat, it’s not hard to do.

Some of this shift reflects the changes all parents have to make – and the underreported transformation that parenthood conveys. You get a do-over. Looking down after that first sprint with Leo, I suddenly thought, “I feel like a kid.” And it’s all because now I have a kid. Parenthood does that to you. You become the person you were when you were a child. You are given a chance to wipe the slate clean. Got bad habits? Don’t worry -- you won’t have as much time to indulge them. Never an early riser? You can be one now. Want to run around and burn off the frustration of adulthood? You’ll have plenty of opportunities now.

I love it when my son runs to retrieve something. Something he could have simply walked to get. My partner will tease him, by saying under his breath, “Must run everywhere.” And I think, “Shhhh!” I think, Please don’t let him realize the adult world ceased running as a matter of course a long time ago -- because the adult world sleepwalks through life. He aims toward adult life – it’s the natural trajectory of all humans. But let us imitate him – at the very least by moving our bodies often, without care.

Children who are my son’s age naturally belong to The United Republic of Running. No one is wearing expensive workout tights. No one has sponsorships But they are comparing their performances, contrasting the pros and the cons – and ready to race at any time. No excuses like you hear from adults. One day, when his friend heard that Leo and I raced, he challenged me to a race outside their school. Once again, I went full-on, and he cackled the whole race because he couldn’t believe there was a mom keeping pace with him (or openly acting so wacky) along that sidewalk.

For serious runners, this “baby-step” approach (quite literally) may gall. But it aims at a revolution: Running, running often, out of pure joy, and staying alive.

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What if the Dodgers never left?

I've been thinking all year about the uncle I never met. Which means I have also been thinking about the Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers, since he and my mother were big fans. And I stumbled upon this Slate podcast episode that imagines Brooklyn -- and a minor nearby city named Manhattan -- if in fact the Dodgers had stayed (at least until 2018):

https://slate.com/culture/2018/05/what-if-the-dodgers-had-never-left-brooklyn.html

Hunger Mountain Translation Prize -- "Silvia" is now published!

The first short story connected with my NEA grant, indeed the first short story I ever translated by Edith Bruck -- it's now published!

Thanks to the Hunger Mountain Translation Prize, you can find the story, which is called "Silvia," at this link:

https://hngrmtn.org/issues/hunger-mountain-27/translation/

My thanks to Allison Grimaldi Donahue who chose the story from the other contest entries and to Ms. Bruck for entrusting me with her work.

This story is about a young German boy who is the son of a high-ranking Nazi official. He finds a Jewish stowaway and brings her home to the horror of his proud Third Reich-worshipping mother. The best line? Tough to say but how about, "You always wanted a little girl."

I can only hope many people find their way to the story. Not only because I translated it but because it reminds us, to quote a line of verse from Bruck, that "once upon a time/there was Auschwitz."

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What I read after my father died

That was my original title for the essay -- what I read after my father died -- and still the one that best reflects what inspired this remembrance, which I wrote about spending the past year reading and re-reading the books my father had accumulated over a lifetime:

https://themillions.com/2023/01/the-books-that-made-my-father.html

Grateful to The Millions for agreeing to publish an essay no one needs to read but which I most certainly needed to write.

More books to come (and truth be told, I still have to finish Gulag Archipelago. It makes for dense reading!).

I am grateful for the legacy my father left me -- a love of reading so intense it's like a person in my life.

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Edith Bruck on surviving Auschwitz

This line alone says so much: 

"Chi ha Auschwitz come coinquilino devastatore dentro di sé, scrivendone e parlandone non lo partorirà mai."

It comes from Bruck's nonfiction book, Signora Auschwitz, and it can be translated as follows:

"Whoever has Auschwitz inside of her like a rampaging tenant will never get rid of it by writing and talking about it."

#Giornodellamemoria

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Before and after Auschwitz (Liana Millu) Jan. 27, 2023

In writing a summary of the research I did during a short-term fellowship at the New York Public Library this year, I had to leave out some of the brilliant bits of information I uncovered because I think inhaled enough research for two or three or maybe even four summaries.

And yet they must be recorded and shared because they offer insight, in this case, into one of the greatest enigmas of the 20th century: the Holocaust. Thus I will share them here on my blog, which in fact began many years ago as my digital record of how I keep up my Italian so perhaps it's fitting.

I was at the Library to study the works of an Italian transnational writer whose work I've been translating. And as such, I consulted other works by women authors writing in Italian who survived the Holocaust.

One such writer was Liana Millu [1914-2005]. My old Bennington prof, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, translated her work Smoke Over Birkenau, which was one of the books I read at the Library.

Millu also published another book that hasn't been translated into English: Dopo il fumo: Sono il n. A 5384 di Auschwitz Birkenau [you can translate the title as: "After the Smoke: I Was Prisoner No. A-5384 in Auschwitz Birkenau"].

And in it she defines what it means to survive a concentration camp:

“Venne il funesto 1938 con le leggi razziali; poi la guerra, e con la guerra, uno spartiacque che da solo determina un “prima” e un “poi”: venne Auschwitz.”

Translation (or one way to translate this sentence):

"The grim year 1938 arrived with the racial laws; then the war, and with the war, a watershed moment that alone dictates a 'before' and an 'after': then came Auschwitz."

As I translate work by Italian transnational writer Edith Bruck (the purpose of my fellowship at the Library and the subject of my NEA fellowship in literature), I am galvanized despite the difficulty of placing work in translation in American journals or with American publishers. 

Because this testimony must be shared, disseminated and conserved for as long as humans roam the earth.

(I am posting this now for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, 2023)

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The Year in Writing and Failing (final edition)

The year went so badly for writing that I pre-empted this now-annual post with a precocious version over the summer, declaring that "while I am writing, I am failing."

My year-end taking-stock has been an enjoyable ritual for the past 7 years as I am typically able to log a few solid accomplishments each year. 

That's despite the fact that I am still a completely unknown writer (trust me) and an emerging literary translator (emerging at my tender age, by the way, not so great).  

(If you're curious, here's the post from 2019 and another one dedicated to literary translation). 

But 2022 diverged so thoroughly from the outline of my writing goals for the year that in a fit of despair, I decided in July to declare 2022 'The Year In Writing and Failing' (OK, yes, only on my blog, which is read by about five people, but as you can see on the right, last year was 'The Year in Writing and Contemplation,' which sounds oh so much better than failure).

And it's because I'd decided that 2022 would be the year to write about the uncle I never knew.

What I didn’t know, of course, is that it would also be the year I struggled to write about the uncle I never knew -- struggled over and over and over. I submitted the idea dozens of times in myriad different versions, writing it and rewriting it.

Nicknamed Spike, my uncle died long before I was born -- before he could even become my uncle. Exactly 65 years ago this year.

And now at the end of what I’d dubbed the Year of Spike, I have not told his whole story -- but I did manage to tell a part of it. An 11th hour compromise that introduced my readers to him, and the hole his death left in my mother's life.

By which I mean: at the end of November, I published an essay in Boston Globe's Ideas section about the importance of recording our parents' stories, and it included excerpts from an interview I conducted with my mother about Spike. Here's the essay:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/23/opinion/why-you-should-record-your-holiday-dinner-conversations/

So much about Spike remains in my notebook and unpublished: the details of an archival article I found about the accident ("Youth, 18, Killed in Crash"), the comments sent via email by his octogenarian schoolmates from the now defunct Brooklyn Prep high school (that he was "a wild man," that he went to "smoochie smoochie parties," that he was defined by speed and fun), the list of high school activities (he ran track, was in the honor guard, had twice been elected Class Vice President, etc), the scholarship he may have received to the College of the Holy Cross (the college doesn't still have admission records from 1957 -- I checked).

What I read in 2022 & What I plan to read in 2023

Reading is much more than a hobby for many of us, right? It's the equivalent of a runner's pre-marathon workouts. It's breathing (essential) and also eating chocolate (indulgent). Reading is such an important part of the work I do -- and the way I want to live my life -- that I have long kept lists of what I read each year.

So I suppose it's natural that I've now evolved into the kind of reader who plans what she's going to read each year.

Not that I always fulfill my reading campaign promises (you can see here what I planned to read in last year's reading roundup) but having a plan helps me map out the genres I want to immerse myself in.

I always know I will read books in Italian (mainly 20th century fiction by emerging or overlooked Italian women authors). I also know that I will do a fair amount of reading connected to my translation work, in particular this year books about the Holocaust since I have an NEA grant in literature to translate the short stories of Edith Bruck, a transnational Italian writer whose work is often inspired by her deportation at age 12 to Auschwitz. 

Lastly, I write memoir so I read memoir or works with aspects of memoir. And this year I read Bonnie Tsui's Why We Swim, and Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails by Tim Parks, as well as my first Emmanuel Carrere: Lives Other than My Own, plus I re-read Il sistema periodico (=The Periodic Table) by Primo Levi.

Reading is tied to obsessions, right? So I've become obsessed with dual-language editions but not actually in Italian and English (though I spent a lot of time reading English translations of Italian works, with the original in one hand and the translation in the other). Instead, I have come to love French-Italian dual language books (all because I bought one by Erri de Luca on a whim in Montreal a few years ago), and hunted them down in Florence this past summer by visiting the French bookstore in Piazza Ognissanti.

I also returned to an author who mesmerizes me: Patrick Modiano. (To be clear, I read his work in English, not French -- let there be no mistake!). New books of his that I read in 2022:

Invisible Ink

The Black Notebook

Dora Bruder

This year, I did tackle a whole new genre for me: Graphic novels. And that includes the best of the best: Maus (which, of course, is also connected to my reading on the Shoah).

You'll see below if I read the books I set out to read -- in some cases, yes, in others no. But the most important thing is that I set out to read "any book my father owned or recommended (including perhaps Alan Turing: The Enigma)" and I did just that (including the Turing biography). I wanted to immerse myself in the Michael F. Bonner book collection in the year following his death, and I DID.

Also, a note about the numbers: I read about 40 books, though that doesn't account totally for all of the books I re-read but only in part. I would like to read 50 books one year, which I believe is the annual total for my Uncle Larry (and for my father? Who knows how many books he put away each year?).

The year ahead could be daunting as I feel I need to get serious about reading works that will help me with my translation work. I also feel the press of classics I haven't gotten around to.

Without further ado, here is a partial log of what I read in 2022 ...

(If I list it, you can consider it an endorsement, in the event you're looking for suggestions)

What I actually read (English):

*Forty-one False Starts (essays) by Janet Malcolm (Nonfiction)

*Alan Turing: The Enigma (biography)

*Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails by Tim Parks

*Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui

*Occupation Journal by Jean Giono

*Lives Other than My Own by Emmanuel Carrere

*The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (Sacks)

*The Secret History by Donna Tartt (about Bennington!) (Fiction)

*The Torqued Man by Peter Mann (ditto)

*If You Kept A Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani and translated gloriously by Elizabeth Harris

*We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

*Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

*Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (permission given to all to stop reading my blog right now to go read this book right now)

*Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness

("This anthology was born of a desire to gather works of poetic witness to the sufferings and struggles of the 20th century," reads the introduction, and the compendium includes this line of verse from Abba Kovner: "Sorrow already on his clothes/Like an eternal crease.")

What I actually read (Italian):

*Accabadora by Michele Murgia (Fiction)

*Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano (In Italian, yes, just because)

*Le otto montagne by Paolo Cognetti

*Come una rana d'inverno: Conversazioni con tre sopravvissute by Daniela Padoan (Nonfiction)

*Sono Francesco by Edith Bruck

*"Inverno in Abruzzo" ("Winter in Abruzzo") an essay by Natalia Ginzburg that I re-read every year or so if for no other reason than she writes, "...era quello il tempo migliore della mia vita e solo adesso che m'è sfuggito per sempre, solo adesso lo so." = It was the best time of my life and only now that it has gone from me forever, only now do I realize it.)

Graphic novels that I read (NEW CATEGORY!!!):

*The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman (file under essential reading for any human being on Earth)

*Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Dual-language books (NEW CATEGORY!!!):

*La plage/La Spiaggia by Cesare Pavese

*Placeres carnicos/Meaty Pleasures by Monica Lavin, translated by Dorothy Potter Snyder

(This category in 2022 also included quite a few Italian-English combos, such as La stanza del vescovo, Il sistema periodico and Lettera alla madre, as part of my on-the-job translational studies, but I am particularly interested in the French-Italian editions).

What I re-read (Italian):

*Se questo è un uomo, Levi

*Il sistema periodico, Levi

*Lettera alla madre by Edith Bruck

*A ciascuno il suo by Leonardo Sciascia (birthday treat; I sometimes re-read his novel, Il giorno della civetta, in which he wrote this inimitable thought: "Niente è la morte in confronto alla vergogna." You can translate it like this: Death is nothing compared to shame. And there you were thinking nothing could be worse than death, right?)

What I re-read (English):

*A Christmas Carol -- Dickens

Some of the books I'd planned to read but did not:

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold 

Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey

*The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Books I began but did not finish:

*What You Have Heard Is True 

*The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain

*This Is Your Brain On Music

What I'd like to read in 2023:

*Horizontal Vertical: A City Called Mexico by Juan Villoro (began it last year but had to return it to the library before I was finished -- it's brilliant!)

*A book by new Nobel Laureate Annie Ernaux

*The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

*Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

*Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey

*Books about Patrick Modiano (and probably by him, too)

*The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin

*Graphic novels of the caliber of Maus and Fun Home (SUGGESTIONS, PLEASE!)

*Se consideri le colpe by Andrea Bajani (in the original)

*The Friends of Eddie Coyle (file under 'books from my father's library')

*The bible in Italian (I've never read it in Italian, now have I? So I bought a copy this year)

*The Letters of Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante (Quando verrai saro’ quasi felice)

*Clint Smith's How the Word Is Passed

So what did you read this year? What can you recommend, especially in the genres of graphic novel, memoir and spooky post-war psychological thrillers (fiction or nonfiction)?

And what do you plan to read in 2023? So exciting! Another year of reading awaits us, my friends.

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Dialogue I once overheard on the bus to Bennington town from campus:

“Down there in Texas when I was working for A&M, they asked me to make some pizzas," a passenger says to no one in particular. "I made some heart pizzas, some diamond pizzas. And they were like, ‘Whoa!’”

“Chili’s. They keep saying they’re hiring,” he continues, as we pass the fast food restaurant. “But then I put in an application and they say they have no jobs.”

“Fuck it -- I’ll keep putting applications in.”

“De-termination,” the bus driver says.

“What does that mean?”

“You keep at it. Perseverance.”

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Spode Christmas cup time (sort of like pumpkin spice season?)

It's the little things, right? 

Always the little things that make life worth living.

So Spode Christmas coffee cups for my Italian coffee.

Why you should press 'record' on Thanksgiving (for the Boston Globe)

I began by recording Leo, and ended up recording my parents. 

And I've published an essay about doing both while also researching the Uncle I Never Knew for the Boston Globe.

I also managed to quote Jay Allison, the Moth Radio Hour impresario who says something so beautiful it might have been worth building an essay around:

"Sound gets inside of you -- it inhabits you. It can break your heart."

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/11/23/opinion/why-you-should-record-your-holiday-dinner-conversations/

Why does it have to be so hard?

April 12, 2022

Lost diary entry

Last night after a day of working in the garden in Avon and admiring my father’s books and running on the beach with Caramel, I couldn’t resist any longer – I began to cry, saying to Mike, “Why does it have to be so hard?” But really I should have said, Why do we have to only appreciate everything when it's gone? Most interesting man I ever knew, my father, and yet I often shooed him away like he was some bothersome child. Like everyone had a father who was an encyclopedia of musical knowledge (among other things) and a master gardener and a minor comedian.

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Writing about Didion for CNN and revisiting 'The Second Coming'

I spent yesterday writing a piece about the Joan Didion auction, and immersing myself once again in her seminal 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I couldn't help but think over the lines of verse from Yeats that inspired the title:

...what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

So I re-read the poem ("The Second Coming") and now it's all my head can conjure.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Read the poem here courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.

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(P.S. I sought it out first in the 1944 anthology of British and American verse that I cadged from my father decades ago but it wasn't there; what was there, once again: "Dulce et decorum est": 'the ecstasy of fumbling' and the bitter descriptions of how war distorts the very flesh of the men forced to wage it)

On all of the Joan Didion items you might want to buy (for CNN)

Every now and again, I file stories for CNN (instead of simply editing other writers' stories), and every now and again I am able to combine my identities as a part-time journalist and a part-time essayist while reporting a story.

This is one of those occasions. I wrote about the auction of personal items that once belonged to seminal writer Joan Didion.

Of course, I've read Didion's work! I aim to chronicle my whole life through essays so I've absorbed many of hers, and was thrilled to quote a few of my favorites in this auction preview story.

A bit chagrined that I am already priced out of said auction -- which includes artwork, furnishings and unused writing notebooks (that last item, hmmm, yes I would happily take those if they weren't selling for $2,500!).

I began reading the Tracy Daugherty biography & revisiting other works -- I'm even thinking it's time to find my copy of Play It As It Lays, though I haven't seen it in years. Maybe decades.

Oh and I'll take recommendations for favorite Didion works I haven't read. Not that I need anything else to put on the TBR pile but...

Here's to pioneering women writers. Here's to women writers who are so successful and iconic that their belongings are coveted.

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Feeding my Modiano obsession (and yours)

From the novel, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood:

He had written this book only in the hope that she might get in touch with him. Writing a book, for him, was also a way of beaming a searchlight or sending out coded signals to certain people with whom he had lost touch.

The novel is by Patrick Modiano -- the first work I read by the French Nobel Laureate. And the start of an obsession. Coded signals!

Are you, too, obsessed with Modiano? I even stalk one of his translators on Twitter!

In the event you've also fallen under the spell of Patrick Modiano, I've compiled a list of links so I can obsessively immerse myself in his history.

Since that first wonderful novel, I've read the following books by Modiano:

Suspended Sentences

The Black Notebook

Invisible Ink

Missing Person

Pedigree (memoir; you can read an excerpt here https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2015/12/09/patrick-modiano-on-childhood/)

Paris Nocturne

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Occupation Trilogy

I find his obsession with maps and addresses and half-remembered episodes from his childhood mesmerizing.

I also love the way he presents childhood as a puzzle we spend the rest of our lives trying to solve.

And his obsession with perennially reconstructing his childhood mirrors my own, though he is careful to point out in Pedigree that he does so without nostalgia. His father was a shadowy figure -- on the run during World War II because of his Jewish heritage and willing to get his hands dirty to stay free -- and along with his mother, who performed in theater, frequently left Modiano in the care of friends.

If you, too, are mesmerized by this French fiction master, here are some good articles about Modiano:

From France Today:

https://francetoday.com/learn/books/patrick_modiano_literary_giant/

From The New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/patrick-modianos-postwar

AND

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/the-unforgotten-books-alexandra-schwartz

From Slate:

https://slate.com/culture/2014/10/patrick-modiano-wins-nobel-prize-these-are-his-three-best-books.html

From 3:AM Magazine:

https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/patrick-modiano-in-and-out-of-silence/

From the Paris Review:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/02/24/lamplight-and-shadow/

From the website of Yale University Press (which has published some of Modiano's English translations):

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2020/12/18/a-conversation-with-patrick-modiano/

I had a ridiculous thought this past week -- we'll see if I follow through: perhaps I will try to read one of Modiano's books in the original French (with the English version close at hand; it would make sense to read a book I've already read). It's something I do when I am conducting translational research for my Italian translations -- comparing the English version to see how it matches up against the Italian original.

In this case, I will really be shoring up my High School French but small literary adventures like these make life truly rich, especially during those final hours of the day when a mother of a 10-year-old is looking for a small treat.

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