Chiaroscuro

Library Journal

A novelist and editor of an anthology of Italian American women writers (The Dream Book, Ayer, 1989), Barolini uses this memoir to explore her identity as an American writer of Italian descent. She writes well and sustains the reader's interest, particularly when she reflects on her childhood experiences in Syracuse, New York. "How I Learned to Speak Italian," for example, describes learning the language in college that her assimilated parents did not speak at home. The memoirs are interspersed with essays concerning the status of Italian American writers as reflected in American publications. Barolini argues that a regressive selection process in reference works and editorial bias at the New York Times have shortchanged Italian American writers. The aggrieved tone and blatant self-promotion is mitigated by her sincere admiration for the little-known works of other Italian American writers. Recommended for academic and research libraries.Caroline A. Mitchell, Washington, D.C.

Booknews

Essays gleaned over 25 years blend memoir and commentary on literature as a formative influence. This edition updates the 1997 introduction to the award-winning collection, . Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

Novelist Barolini (Umbertina, 1979, etc.) provides an uneven collection of essays that wander in that unclear terrain which links the search for her Italian cultural origins with her essentially American upbringing.

Her drive toward artistic expression is informed by her search for a voice and its true territory. The author misses the powerful inspiration that exists in feeling ostracized by ethnicity. She feels a burdensome need to punish the publishing and academic worlds for not having heralded an Italian-American literary tradition, but her argument fails. She quotes widely from a rich tradition of American writers on the importance of being a voice from the outside, but she doesn't hear herself when she cites García Márquez: "The revolutionary duty [of a writer] if you like, is simply to write well." Only rarely does Barolini let her own creativity fly. She shows us what she can do in chapters on her earliest intimations of a writerly self; her adult experiences in Rome, where the American and the Italian in her finally meet (this latter was only acquired in adulthood, while living and raising children there); and a loose charting of the wonders of language, in which she maintains her "belief . . . that any writer from a marginalized position is writing in the most American of traditions—that of the Outsider." At last. Too often, she cannot override her need to state and restate the business of being a woman, an Italian woman, and an Italian woman writer. She is at her best when she writes the way memory feels, as when she links her home on James Street in a small upstate New York town with her thoughts about Henry James, or when she cringes at remembering her first encounter with John Cheever through a screen door in her home in Croton, N.Y. She writes richly about her Catholic upbringing, letting us know that she is determined to be heard.

If only she could focus on the life at hand—and leave literary proselytizing to commentators.