San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Shifting quest across homeland
Working part time in an academic Berkeley bookstore in her last year of college, 25yearold Gabriele becomes intrigued by the sizable, eccentric orders from Giordano Vietri, an unknown customer in her mother’s home country of Italy.
Feeling stifled and disconnected from her life in America, Gabriele eventually lands in Rome with the intention to meet Vietri, “to sit on a stool at his feet like an acolyte and have him tell me … how I should live this life.”
Thus begins Nicola DeRobertisTheye’s debut novel, “The Vietri Project,” a coolly observed literary deconstruction of the quest. Gabriele makes early progress in her search for the mysterious buyer of books but, like a traveler with no set agenda, she soon becomes distracted by red herrings and diversions, picking up the trail of a painter living in exile in the 1930s who may have known Vietri as a teenager and meeting the widow of one of Vietri’s fellow soldiers, a unit that committed horrific war crimes in Africa in the 1940s.
A quest without a quest. Ultimately, “The Vietri Project” is not about Vietri. Rather, this wandering bildungsroman unfolds as selfrealization: gradually, thoughtfully, around the metaphor of city as self. This meditation on history, identity and family questions how and why we form the stories we tell about ourselves. As Gabriele explores Italy’s history (shameful, as all history tends to be), she also lays bare her own difficult past: her mother’s ongoing mental illness and how it has estranged Gabriele from both her parent and her Italian family. As Gabriele stays on in Rome, she slowly reconnects with her relatives, portrayed with little sentimentality.
Toward the end of the book, a character observes, “I think what people want is a connection to the narrative of history, though they are stuck in the present.” In a world where our history, both personal and that of our culture, can be one of cruelty or abandonment, how do we make sense of it to live with ease in the present? Gabriele herself acknowledges that the search for Vietri is a non sequitur, a deliberate derailing she is hesitant to give up because “then I would need to choose a new life.” DeRobertisTheye’s writing evokes the existential doubt, even dread, of young women searching for a place in an unfriendly world.
As a narrator, Gabriele embodies the listlessness and anxiety of her age but none of the livewire energy of youth. Sex, when it happens, is recounted dispassionately; a new relationship at the end of the novel is observed with spare emotion. We get flashes of poetry — old men line the street like “crows on a wire” — but the majority of this novel is concerned with Gabriele’s musings and meanderings. “The Vietri Project” is interested in interiors, character’s homes and minds. Secrets and regrets. What is unsaid.
Suited to patient readers who seek something measured and esoteric and, like Gabriele, prefer questions to answers.