“Looks like an alien abduction”–were the first words out of my mouth as I tumbled into the Pantheon, gaping at the triangle of light streaming down through the oculus, my mouth hanging open. One hand in my pocket, the other clad in a black leather glove, holding onto a Field Notes notebook, I wandered around trying to put into words the feeling of lightness and awe and the smell of roasted chestnuts wafting into the Grant Rotunda through the open doors. This is the picture imprinted in some corner of my brain, of my first trip to Rome. Anthony Doerr’s memoir Four Seasons in Rome took me right back to that place.
His memoir is set in the year Bush got elected a second time. The same year in which Pope John Paull II passed away. There is an entire chapter(or maybe two) dedicated to the biggest funeral the world has ever seen. Pantheon is a recurring character in the book, where even objects, streets and places have a vitality breathed into them by Doerr’s lyrical, anthropomorphic writing. You can picture the thick heat of summer, synchronized ballet of starling murmurations, taste the fresh tomatoes and olives.
I have been a fan of Doerr’s writing style from the first page of Cloud Cuckoo Land. In this memoir he writes about the year he spent in Rome on a writing fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, while living in the Monteverde neighborhood and working on a book set in France during World War II, which I’m guessing is the Pulitzer prize winning All the Light We Cannot See(it is not explicit). Doerr and Shauna, his wife, are also in the throes of early parenthood—their twins are 3 months old. The book is at the same time a love letter to Rome as it is the trials and tribulations of caring for infants round the clock – the sleep deprivation, overwhelm, the guilt when one partner ends up with the bulk of child rearing responsibilities.
You are granted front row seats to Doerr’s writing process. His astute observation of everyday Romans, their customs and idiosyncrasies. How he ekes out short flashes of deep work between parenting and reading works of Pliny. Rome pulses, throbs, flows around you with the cast of characters brought alive by Doerr’s writing – the watchman of the Academy building, the shopkeeper with whom he trades in halting Italian, the warm old ladies who dote over the twin boys, Tacy the nurturing babysitter who herself is an immigrant in Italy, away from home and her own son. By the end of the book I yearned to know these people some more–didn’t want the book to end.
My craving for Rome unsatiated, I continued on to other books set in the city. Jhumpa Lahiri, the Pulitzer prize winning author of Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies lives in Rome and now writes exclusively in Italian. She is a superwoman as far as I am concerned—to gain mastery in a new language and to write such beautiful works in it is a feat I cannot comprehend. Lahiri’s Roman Stories is chock full of poignant stories of immigrant experience. It makes you question the concept of belonging and home. My favorite is “The Steps” – a public staircase that means different things to different people. It becomes a totem of the human condition.
I followed this up with In Other Words, Lahiri’s memoir that spans her life until now–Italy the connecting thread. Ann Goldstein translated it into English, she also translated Elena Ferrante’s works. In Other Words intricately lays out Lahiri’s Italian education. She makes you ponder about the meaning of one’s home country—is language and love not enough? Unrequited love is a looming presence — the one sided love between Lahiri and Italy, the place she longs to call home, though it keeps her at arm’s length. Her longing for acceptance is wistful, palpable.
Notable lines from Four Seasons in Rome:
On Rome – “Too much beauty, too much input; if you’re not careful, you can overdose”.
On Writing – “And doesn’t a writer do the same thing? Isn’t she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.”