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Sea of Memory: A Novel |
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Reviews |
Description:
One might expect a coming-of-age story set in a small Italian fishing village in the 1950s to wax idyllic, but Erri De Luca confounds expectation. Though the novel has more than its share of halcyon days in the sun, a troubling undercurrent runs through it. The unnamed narrator, a 16-year-old boy summering with his family on an island off the coast of Naples, is confronted with Italy's fascist past when he meets Caia, a young Romanian Jew whose family was decimated during the war. As the boy learns more about her circumstances, he demands answers from the adults around him--answers they are increasingly reluctant to give. Only Nicola, a local fisherman who served with the Italian army in Yugoslavia, offers any clues to Italy's complicity: The war lived on in a few odd details that he would relate over and over again: an empty window seen from the street, and behind the window no house, not even a roof, and you could see the sky. Windows are made to see the sky, but not like that. And there was a market square where grass grew because there was nothing to sell and no one ever went there, not even to exchange a few words. Grass can be a sad thing when it grows between the cobblestones of a market. De Luca hangs his story on two mirror images: the wartime invasion of Italy by German forces followed, just a few years later, by another incursion--this time of tourists--from the same nation. As Caia relates the realities of life during the German occupation, it becomes harder and harder for the boy to reconcile his country's past with its complacent present. Part love story, part ghost story, Sea of Memory is a haunting tale rendered in evocative prose. --Margaret Prior
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