Mother Tongue: An American Life in Italy

Rating:
Summary: Pretentious claptrap
Review: If ranked on the scale of self-indulgence, this book beats "Under the Tuscan Sun" hands down, and this is not praise for Frances Mayes. On the strength of the too-kind-by-half editorial and customer reviews on this page, I bought this book hoping for an unromanticized picture of living in Italy. I got instead a maundering exercise in microscopic navel contemplation. Worse, every time a promising detail appears it somehow turns into an unwelcome sermon. This unpleasantly disjointed book veers off into irrelevancy so often and so distractedly one wonders if the author wouldn't benefit from a course of Ritalin therapy. It's true that there are scattered here and there tiny passages of insight into being in Italy as something other than a tourist, but they are too few, and frequently so obscure that I had to read passages three times to wring any meaning at all out of them. Three-quarters of the way through, the conviction that I was searching for pennies in a pigsty overcame my determination to slog through somehow: it just wasn't worth the effort. I'm not proposing this should have been something so prosaic as a travelogue; I was looking for the inner voice as well as practical knowledge. As someone who has studied in and traveled to Italy many times, I've warily considered moving there, and have sought out books that can provide real insight into living in Italy from an expatriate's perspective. "Tuscan Sun" wasn't it, because it really wasn't about living in Italy at all, and despite its relentless charm it was superficial and unconvincing. Equally unwelcome, though, are the dime-store philosophizing, the fractured polemics and the arty but artless syntactical histrionics of this work, particularly since there's so little real information contained in it.

Rating:
Summary: More than memoir
Review: This book examines related and ramifying themes: a complex accomodation to the writer's life abroad in her second marriage to a gifted Italian scientist, the life of her late Italian mother-in-law, the rewards and challenges of raising an American-born daughter in Italy, and the history of Parma as an expatriate discovers it. through an idiosyncratic and utterly charming progression of chapters. The gifted poet and essayist behind these reflections emerges in a self-portrait unobtrusively yet indelibly. Life and death challenge her, an adopted country both welcomes and resists her: a sensibility of great depth and nuance undergoes reshaping in the event. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi's subsequent book of lyrics, BEES AND OTHER POEMS (2001), carries this sensibility into free verse of distinction and agile grace. The prose here, like the poems printed subsequently, manifest an integral stylist, who inquires with sharp eye and open heart, and makes the connections that want to be made, both the elusive and the penetrating ones. A distinguished and inventive book.

John Peck

Rating:
Summary: More than memoir
Review: This book examines related and ramifying themes: a complex accomodation to the writer's life abroad in her second marriage to a gifted Italian scientist, the life of her late Italian mother-in-law, the rewards and challenges of raising an American-born daughter in Italy, and the history of Parma as an expatriate discovers it. through an idiosyncratic and utterly charming progression of chapters. The gifted poet and essayist behind these reflections emerges in a self-portrait unobtrusively yet indelibly. Life and death challenge her, an adopted country both welcomes and resists her: a sensibility of great depth and nuance undergoes reshaping in the event. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi's subsequent book of lyrics, BEES AND OTHER POEMS (2001), carries this sensibility into free verse of distinction and agile grace. The prose here, like the poems printed subsequently, manifest an integral stylist, who inquires with sharp eye and open heart, and makes the connections that want to be made, both the elusive and the penetrating ones. A distinguished and inventive book.

John Peck

Rating:
Summary: An alternative view of Italy
Review: This book is a welcome diversion from the self-indulgent, romanticized views of Italy provided by books like "Under the Tuscan Sun." As an American who once lived in Tuscany, I felt a sense of deja vu as I read Wilde-Menozzi's memoir, especially when she talked about the soul-splitting that can occur when you abandon the security of your own language and culture. People often talk about Italy in terms of light and warmth, but it can also be full of shadows, and one can't live there without coming to terms with both sides.This is a beautiful book, especially in that it embraces the paradoxes of two different cultures without favoring one over the other. It's not an easy read, but anyone who wants a better understanding of Italian life would benefit from it. I wish I'd had the book on hand while I was living overseas.