Fred Gardaphe. The Art of Reading Italian Americana: Italian American Culture in Review.
Fred Gardaphe. The Art of Reading Italian Americana: Italian American Culture in Review. New York: Bordighera Press, 2011. Pp. 210.Fred Gardaphe's book is a truly valuable work. Vast and informative in content, meticulous in treatment, scholarly in approach, and refined in style, the book contains over 90 reviews written by the author over the span of ten years, from 1995 to 2005, for Fra Noi, a long-time publication for Chicago's Italian American community and recently revamped and accessible online. In his reviews, Gardaphe presents biographical information on each author, chronologically organized, followed by a synopsis, an analysis, and finally an evaluation of the work examined. The collection closes with six additional longer reviews and review essays written by Gardaphe.
In the introduction, Gardaphe briefly explains his choice of the title, The Art of Reading Italian Americana. By adopting the tolstoyan conception of art as an emotional link between the artist and the audience, the author sees his reviews as a way of "talking back" to the writers. Essentially, he wants to acknowledge and reciprocate the feelings he experienced while reading the books under review, and, ultimately, for him that is art. He started to read because he wanted to write, and in the search of the ideal book to write he encountered many that helped him to define his "thinking and writing" (12). Reading Italian American authors, or reading about them, was a necessary intellectual activity for Gardaphe in order to comprehend his own italianitga. Still outraged by Gay Talese's essay entitled "Where Are the Italian American Novelists?," which appeared in 1993 in the New York Times, Gardaphe reminds his readers, and Talese himself, that Italian American writers do exist but that Talese, mistakenly, has never taken the time to read and enjoy them.
The rich collection shows that indeed there are Italian American authors who have written extensively on a variety of subjects beyond the American experience, the diaspora, and the questions of assimilation or marginalization. Joe Amato's Bookend: Anatomies of a Virtual Self, for instance, is a truly experimental work that gathers together "thoughts that are normally shuffled into different books such as literary criticism, poetry, biography [...] cook books, and more" (13). There is also Frank Lentricchia, whose "anti-story," entitled Lucchesi and the Whale, draws inspiration from novels by Don DeLillo and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (124). Other reviews cover topics as diverse as vengeful madonnas, magic, and masochism (as in Michael P. Carroll's Madonnas That Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy Since the Fifteenth Century), gangsters' legendary and infamous lives (as in Luciano Iorizzo's Al Capone: A Biography), fascism, exile, and tragedy (as in Stanislao Pugliese's Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifaseist Exile). These and other works reviewed in this volume demonstrate that Italian American literature goes well beyond what Rose Basile-Green discussed in The Italian American Novel (1974), in which she associates Italian American literary production with stages of Italian American social history. In fact, however, Italian American literature transcends the immigrant experience and touches different fields, including sociology, anthropology, history, and literary criticism. In a nutshell, Italian American writers discuss the human condition.
Particularly enlightening are the six additional review essays whose topics range from the mafia to working-class culture and drug addiction (in George Veltri's novel, Nice Boy: A Novel, and Kim Addonizio's poems, Jimmy & Rita), and the sorrows of a young writer (in Jay Parini's novel The Apprentice Lover). Through these essays Gardaphe provides a "more in-depth look at the production of Italian American writers" (12) while synthesizing his own take on his heritage. He generates innovative responses and complex analyses of Italian American writers' productions that surpass their generational and geographical models, and in doing so he generates new readings and interpretations in the light of critical theory. In "Could This Be the End of ... Gangsters in Fiction and Fact," Gardaphe claims that the Italian American mobsters depicted in films like Donnie Brasco or books like Mario Puzo's The Last Don have little in common with reality. According to him, a true understanding of the issues that motivate the creation of such stereotypes would empower the Italian American community. He writes: "Up until this point, Italian America has been defined by the myth of mafia [...] what we do in response to the myth will define us and determine the future of our community and identity as Italian Americans" (188). He continues, in the same paragraph, by suggesting that the gangster figure simply allows Americans to "reclaim a sense of power" in society while "failing in the real fight to make America safe."
The collection successfully continues Gardaphe's attempt to establish an Italian American discourse and affirms the author as a prominent voice in the Italian American milieu. Let's not forget his previous works, Italian Signs, American Streets (1996) and the co-edited From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (2000), both exemplary in combining textual criticism and creative works. The book is highly recommended for those unfamiliar with the Italian American literary tradition but interested in learning about it, as well as for those in the field as a reaffirmation of how rich and consistent Italian American cultural production really is.
FRANCESCA M. MUCCINI
Belmont University
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| Author: | Muccini, Francesca M. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Forum Italicum |
| Article Type: | Book review |
| Date: | Sep 22, 2012 |
| Words: | 863 |
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