Family Secrets

With her first novel “Rules of the Wild,” the story of a woman torn between two men in Kenya’s white expatriate community, Italian writer Francesca Marciano garnered critical praise for her elegant, eloquent prose and for placing the romance within a political context. Marciano displays both those gifts in her second work of fiction, a tale of family secrets and sorrows centered on a farmhouse in southern Italy.

Sexual and political betrayal intertwine, and the passion for social justice springs from personal wounds. “Casa Rossa” is notable for its rueful understanding of the volatile mix of emotions that binds us to those we love.

Alina Strada wanders through the rooms of her childhood home, Casa Rossa, just after it has been sold. She has returned to pack up its contents before the movers arrive. The sale acknowledges what preceded it: a series of departures and losses prompted by “a secret, an unspoken legacy” that Alina believes has crippled her; her mother, Alba; and her older sister, Isabella.

Sensitive, introspective Alina has unfinished business with her family’s past, and we see her sorting it out over the course of a narrative that skillfully interweaves her present-day, present-tense narration with three generations of Strada history.

Alina’s grandfather, Lorenzo, a mediocre painter supported by the income from his family’s marble quarries in Carrara, buys Casa Rossa in the late 1920s. Obsessively in love with Renee, the Tunisian beauty he met and married in France, he plans to transform the crumbling farmhouse into “a place our children will be able to call home.” But Renee is oppressed both by his possessiveness and by a region whose rural poverty is far too reminiscent of her North African youth; she flees in the summer of 1940 to spend the rest of her life with a wealthy German woman.

Devastated and vengeful, Lorenzo makes Casa Rossa his retreat from the world. Alba, 5 years old when her mother leaves, grows up isolated in a remote, backward village. “She was different from every other child she knew,” Alina comments. “She grew up awkward and moody.”

Alba will never be entirely at home in the world or with other people, but after she meets sensitive Roman screenwriter Oliviero on a train heading south in the summer of 1958, his love for a while fills the void in the heart of this aloof yet burningly lonely young woman.

Although Lorenzo, Renee and Oliviero loom large in these pages, their stories are backdrops for the primal drama of the struggles among Alba, Alina and Isabella, whose very different personalities shape their responses to the troubled family legacy incarnated in the stones of Casa Rossa.

Strong, fearless and angry, Isabella joins one of the armed radical groups tearing apart Italian society in the late 1970s. Alina, two years younger, is quieter and less confrontational; she dulls the pain of her father’s death and her mother’s remoteness with drugs. “Typical you--to choose anesthesia over facing the truth,” sneers Isabella, who goes underground just before Alina sobers up and heads to New York, where she falls in love with magazine writer Daniel Moore.

Their affair points to the gulf between Europeans’ ingrained knowledge of ethical ambiguities and Americans’ more black-and-white notions of morality, though this contrast is somewhat over-explained and over-schematized (his shock when she tells him that Isabella has been arrested for the murder of a magistrate seems implausibly naive for a journalist). Isabella’s trial draws Alina back to Rome; the sisters’ awkward reconciliation is moving, as is Alina’s newly mature understanding of their mother’s faults. But when Daniel turns up in Italy, then betrays Alina in the most fundamental way, he acts more as a plot device than as a believable human being.

Happily, the Italian actors in this drama remain credible and complex, even if Marciano does tie up the loose threads in their lives a little too neatly. (Isabella in particular is more than amply punished for her failures as a sister and a citizen.) As the novel moves toward its rain-soaked denouement, the author’s affection for her characters redeems her habit of making her themes unnecessarily explicit. The nude fresco of Renee, whitewashed by shocked villagers in Chapter 1 only to reemerge during a storm on Alba’s and Alina’s last morning at Casa Rossa, may be a trifle obvious as a symbol, but the laughter it provokes rings true as mother and daughter finally find their way into each other’s arms.

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From ‘The Book of Illusions’

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen. Considering that I was the author of the only book ever written on Hector Mann, it probably made sense that someone would think I’d jump at the chance to believe he was still alive. But I wasn’t in the mood to jump. Or at least I didn’t think I was. My book had been born out of a great sorrow, and now that the book was behind me, the sorrow was still there. Writing about comedy had been no more than a pretext, an odd form of medicine that I had swallowed every day for over a year on the off chance that it would dull the pain inside me. To some extent, it did. But Frieda Spelling (or whoever was posing as Frieda Spelling) couldn’t have known that. She couldn’t have known that on June 7, 1985, just one week short of my tenth wedding anniversary, my wife and two sons had been killed in a plane crash. She might have seen that the book was dedicated to them (For Helen, Todd, and Marco--In Memory), but those names couldn’t have meant anything to her ....Every time I open a drawer or look in the back of an armoire, some new discovery stuns me. I keep turning between my fingers what I have just found, as if expecting it to talk to me. An old dusty ribbon (a hat? gift wrapping?), a newspaper clipping from the ‘50s, the obituary page (whose death are we looking at here?) a single light-blue silk shoe, custom-made in Paris (Renee’s?) ....

It’s like trying to trace the history of an Egyptian mummy from her ring, a few glass beads, bits of broken pottery, a faded inscription. Yes, she was a merchant’s wife--no, a pharaoh’s sister, or maybe a high priestess. History demands a plot with a proper beginning and a proper end.

This is not a story about what we know, not about what we have.

This is about what gets lost on the way.