Public Libraries of Suffolk County, New York

The Vietri Project, a novel, Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

eng

no index present

novels

The Vietri Project

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

a novel

"An achingly intimate debut about a young bookseller who embarks on a quest to find a mysterious customer in Rome, leading her to confront the complicated history of both her family and Italy itself. Gabriele is in her early twenties and working at a bookstore in Berkeley when she becomes intrigued by a signor Vietri in Rome, whose unusual and voluminous book orders grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. Haunted by her Italian mother's schizophrenia diagnosis at age twenty-five, the same age Gabriele is now, and unsure of her own choices or future, Gabriele quits her job and eventually finds herself in Italy trying to locate Vietri, throwing herself into a search for a man she has never met and creating further distance from painful relationships with her friends and family at home. As her search for the man becomes instead a discovery of his life story, Gabriele traces a hundred years of Italian history through a trail of obituaries and military records, a memoir of life in a remote village forgotten by modernity, and the court records of a communist trial. Along the way, she meets an eclectic assortment of the city's inhabitants--from the widow of an Italian prisoner of war to members of a generation set adrift by the financial crisis--culminating in a discovery of dark and violent episodes in Italy's colonial history in Ethiopia and Libya. To her surprise, each encounter draws her unexpectedly closer to her own past--her mother's institutionalization and an extended family in Rome looking to recover from a history of betrayals and loss. Through her journey, Gabriele begins to accept what it means to be a member of a family, a citizen of a country, and a woman in the world"--, Dust jacket

adult