Openwork: A Novel

In hauntingly evocative prose, Adria Bernardi creates a finely stitched fabric depicting the intertwined lives of three generations of closely related Italian families. At the novel's beginning, Imola Bartolai's lucid, yet troubled voice speaks from a mountain village on the border of Tuscany in northern Italy where she lives a hard life close to the land with her wandering husband and three children. Her favorite brother, Egidio, seeks a better life in America in the coal mines of Dawson, New Mexico. When Egidio's quiet voice is silenced by a horrific accident, the voice of his childhood friend and traveling companion, Antenore Gimorri, passionately urges their fellow workers to join the struggle for labor rights. As a stonemason, Gimorri raises three sons in the Chicago area, and it is his granddaughter, Adele, fully assimilated into American life, who closes the circle, traveling to Italy in search of her family's roots. In the novel's final section, her voice imaginatively joins Imola's as the two women, separated in time by a hundred years, find that there are many threads that bind them.

Kirkus Reviews

More slices of Italian immigrant life and heritage from Drue-Heinz winner Bernardi. An earlier collection (In the Gathering Woods, 2000) introduced several of the characters who figure in Bernardi's second novel. Around the turn of the last century, Imola, a wife and mother in Ardonla, a Northern Italian mountain village, supplements her family's income by transporting unwanted infants to convents for adoption by wealthy families. Ultimately, she succumbs to the catatonia that has afflicted her female ancestors. Her brother Egidio and his friend Antenore, who nursed a childhood crush on Imola, emigrate to New Mexico to work as coalminers. Egidio is killed in a 1913 mine disaster, after Antenore departs for Colorado to organize miners. When Antenore returns to Italy to find Imola confined to an insane asylum, he meets and marries lovely redhead Desolina and the couple settle in Chicago, where Antenore becomes a prosperous stonemason. Their son Ray, a successful but conflicted traveling salesman, his wife Rina and their children Adele, Michael and Theresa lead a suburban middle-class existence complicated by squabbling, ever-encroaching relatives and Rina's brush with cancer and subsequent hospitalization for depression. Rina's mother, Adalgisa, is an alcoholic and Rina may have inherited Imola's family curse: Her father, Ettore, a landscaper at a country club, is Imola's nephew. Bernardi's strengths are her ear for dialogue and her ability to articulate characters' emotions. However, with the voices of seven principals and many other points-of-view, the narrative threads fail to tie together, leaving only a loose pastiche of linked stories. A tendency to over-explicate serpentine familyties and to circumvent pivotal action with (albeit beautifully rendered) impressionistic strokes further slackens the pace. Bernardi is a prodigious talent, but this time she attempts to do too much.

ADRIA BERNARDI is the author of In the Gathering Woods, a story collection awarded the 2000 Drue Heinz Prize. Her novel, The Day Laid on the Altar, won the Bakeless Fiction Prize. She is also a translator (of works from Italian) and essayist, and teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers near Asheville,North Carolina. She grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago, not far from Highwood-the immigrant community where her grandparents first settled. She now lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons.