Review by New York Times Review
BEATRICE PORTINARI DIED at age 24 on June 8, 1290, and dozens of other figures in the "Commedia" were dead by the week in 1300 when Dante, poet and protagonist, crossed over to the other side. "The Divine Comedy" is a long poem about a lot of dead people, and Dante, no halfway believer in the hereafter, used his gifts - for speech, for the strong image, for extravagant simile - to bring them to life in words. The author of a grief memoir must do likewise. Cut off from the beloved, condemned to a kind of hell, this writer then must return to the world of "solid things" and make the dead live through literary devices. The memoir's life depends on it. It's not fair - isn't the loss of the beloved burden enough? - but it's the way of art. Joseph Luzzi is alive, a professor of Italian at Bard College and the author of a 2014 memoir called "My Two Italies." Alive, too, is his daughter, Isabel, who was delivered, six weeks premature, after her pregnant mother was involved in a car crash. Isabel's mother, Luzzi's wife, did not survive. "Forty-five minutes after Isabel was born, Katherine died" - and Luzzi is thrust into the dark wood that gives his new book a title and a purpose. That she doesn't live again in this heartfelt memoir, even as a muse, makes it something other than the work of art it might have been, and yet it lends the book a raw and unguarded candor. "In the middle of our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood," the book begins, naturally. "The tension between the pronouns says it all: Although the T belongs to Dante, his journey is also part of 'our life.' We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day." With a few strokes, Luzzi makes Dante's opening his own, draws the crucial parallel between Dante's text and human experience, and points the reader toward the "dark wood" of his or her own life. Then come the crash, the grief and the side effects. "A car accident claimed Katherine's body, but my grief would nearly kill her memory," he reports. "For the longest time after her death, she became opaque." Grief leaves him insensate. He's unable to feel much for his baby girl, and his family arranges for his 76-year-old mother to take her in and care for her in Rhode Island. Sure, he's grateful, but he feels the act of kindness as proof that he lacks a talent for fatherhood. He's worn out by the twice-weekly drive between upstate New York and New England (where he lives part time with his mother and his daughter) and by the shabby familiarity of the shore town he thought he had escaped by going to college and Europe and grad school and into the polyglot professoriate. He's cut off from the lives of others even when he's sure it's time to get on with his own: "It was all part of the loneliness that came with grief: the illusion that it was somehow all a personal challenge." That he confesses all this is admirable, and what he has to say about the "electric" quality of grief will be recognizable to readers who have dealt with grief themselves. But as grief turns to mourning - from "Underworld" to "Purgatory" in the book's apt scheme - Luzzi's grief-induced loneliness turns into therapy-induced self-absorption. Vivid images - when, say, a young mother offers to wet-nurse the infant Isabel - come swaddled in high sentiment. ("I couldn't bear the thought of another person, even if she was a loving friend, fulfilling the role that should have been Katherine's.") Clichés show up in bunches: "ivory tower," "uncharted terrain," "perfect storm" all on one page. A passage about Luzzi's obsession with tennis ends perfectly - "Some people turn to drink, some to porn, others to religion; I had chosen a clay rectangle by the sea" - but then a new page begins and he's in bed with a beautiful woman, and "my heart is racing ... as though it's about to burst from my chest." Partly the problem is grief, and partly it's what Henry James called "weak specifications." Quoting Dante, Luzzi tells himself to "stop treating shades as solid things" - but too often in the writing he treats solid things as shades. New girlfriends are boldly inked in, but his daughter and his mother are left in outline. And his deceased wife is just as opaque as he says she is. She has distinguishing features - she wears leopard-skin shoes, is a Republican and thought the movie "Pulp Fiction" "immoral" - but she remains a stock figure, the Midwestern girl come to New York to become an actress. And here she's an actress who gets to speak only a few lines. Not only does the writer-widower not bring his lost love to life; whether out of respect for her or out of deference to the people in his new life, he hardly tries. "'The Divine Comedy' was not a self-help manual," he reminds himself, and for the most part he avoids the glibness of the book's subtitle. Oddly, though, we never actually see him turn to Dante's work for consolation or open a book in a moment of need. Instead, he distributes his insights post hoc so the glories of Dante's towering poem are always brought back to the flatlands of Luzzi's grief. The great poet, his beloved and his profound conception of the afterlife are forced through the needle's eye of the memoirist's outlook, when the intent surely was for readers to have their sense of life and loss made larger through the encounter. Deep into the book, Luzzi describes the halfway point in his weekly commute - "a Dunkin' Donuts in Southbury, Conn., where I would use the bathroom and buy a coffee and a bagel" - and recalls the moment at the doughnut shop when he decided to write his way out of grief. This midpoint - the middle of the road of his own life, not Dante's - is where his story really begins, and when a few pages later he meets a gifted violinist and finds his soul quickening to the music of love and the love of music, his book thrums to life so immediately that you wind up thinking he's a lucky man - lucky to have survived his grief story and lucky to have put it behind him. 'A car accident claimed Katherine's body, but my grief would nearly kill her memory.' PAUL ELIE is the author of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage." His most recent book is "Reinventing Bach."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 5, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Shortly after Luzzi became a widower and a father in the same morning, a neighbor told him that he was in hell. As a scholar of Dante and professor of Italian, Luzzi was deeply familiar with the medieval poet's description of the depths to which people can plunge. But in the four years following his pregnant wife's death in a car accident, Luzzi found that his grief was bringing new meaning to his knowledge of The Divine Comedy. His story is intensely personal, as he strives to rebuild his life after his world was shattered, but it also holds universal appeal for anyone who has experienced love and loss. Luzzi is bracingly honest about his shortcomings, including the way he outsourced much of his daughter's child care to his mother; and his meditations on Dante, the exile who lost his great love, are no less profound. As Luzzi grasps blindly for routes out of his personal underworld, both he and the reader discover that only a change of mind and heart can open the way to love and fulfillment.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Luzzi (My Two Italies), a professor of Italian at Bard College, plunges into a familiar classic he had often taught and studied-Dante's Divine Comedy-that suddenly took on a heartbreaking new resonance after the death of his young wife. In November 2007, Luzzi was in his late 30s, living in Tivoli, N.Y., with Katherine, who was nine months pregnant. He felt he was finally on his way professionally and personally when tragedy struck. A car accident took Katherine's life, yet the baby she carried survived; within a few hours Luzzi found himself both a widower and a new father to a daughter, Isabel. In a narrative that would seem contrived coming from someone less immersed in the language of Dante, Luzzi attests that reading the exiled 14th-century Florentine author at this crucial juncture "gave me the language to understand my own profound sense of displacement." Like Dante's epic poem, Luzzi's narrative moves structurally through the stages of the Underworld, from Hell into Paradise; instead of having Virgil as his guide, Luzzi enlisted his family, namely his old-world mother, Yolanda, to care for Isabel. Yolanda's help was a godsend but also at times got in the way of his emotional connection with his new daughter. Naturally, Katherine serves as his own Beatrice. Luzzi honestly grapples with profound questions about being a man and father in this very literary and very personal work. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Dante serves as a guide through a landscape of sorrow.In November 2007, Luzzi (Italian/Bard Coll.; My Two Italies, 2014, etc.) faced a cataclysmic change in his life: his wife, eight and a half months pregnant, was killed in a car accident; his daughter, born prematurely, was fighting for her life. As he struggled with grief, guilt, and loneliness, Dante's works, which he had long been teaching, "gave me the language to understand my own profound sense of displacement. More important, they enabled me to connect my anguished state to a work of transcendent beauty." In this frank and engaging memoir, Luzzi demonstrates a deep knowledge of Dante's life and writing, interweaving the poet's experiences with his own. He admits feeling numb after the accident, unsure of his ability to be a father and emotionally detached from his infant daughter. As much as he missed his wife, he yearned to find another love; self-protectively, he buried himself obsessively in teaching and scholarship. Dante suffered similarly, condemned to exile, mourning the death of his beloved Beatrice, and devoting himself obsessively to poetry. Luzzi is not proud of turning over his daughter's care to his selfless 77-year-old mother and sisters, for him "the path of least resistance" that allowed him to return to the classroom and, nearly a year into widowerhood, to begin a relationship. With his competent female relatives willing to raise his daughter, he decided he couldn't face "the drudgery [and] grinding rhythms of focusing exclusively on a child." He had never, he confesses, considered what child care responsibilities he would have had if his wife had lived. When his first relationship ended, he embarked on a desperate search for a companion, meeting women through online dating sites, which was a dispiriting experience. It took years before he found a new love and embraced his role as a father. A forthright chronicle of emergence from darkness. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
