Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #269125 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-09
• Released on: 2009-06-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780374208912
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Venezia's tale traces five generations of the Falcone family, beginning with Don Francesco Falcone—a rich, powerful, feared and often unsympathetic man—and his mistress, farmworker Concetta, who bears him six daughters before delivering a much-longed-for son. The women form the rich backbone of the story as they strive to overcome their sometimes unbearable circumstances. Through Gioia, a fifth-generation Falcone, Venezia travels among each generation. Sickly as a child, Gioia finds comfort and fascination in the stories of her forebears, then becomes a voracious reader of everything from Dostoyevski to calendars. Her own love of storytelling paints a word-picture of each of the eras of the family as well as the history of Grottole, the Southern Italian town where the story is set. Venezia also neatly weaves an Italian history lesson throughout, from WWI to the excesses of the '80s. Sometimes heartbreaking, always beautiful, these women will stay with the reader long after the final page is turned. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Carolyn See Although the title of this novel says "been here a thousand years," the ancestors of these characters have lived in Italy far longer than that, dwelling almost since the beginning of time in the instep of the Italian boot. But this particular tale begins on March 27, 1861, the day Rome was designated the official capital of modern Italy. Novelist Mariolina Venezia presents her country's history through several generations of bumptious peasants who change, over the decades, from somnolent, archetypal figures at one with their livestock and landscape to self-conscious, contemporary human beings ridden with knowledge and anxiety. In 1861, their world -- "the town of Grottele, which is in the part of Basilicata that lies about one hundred kilometers from the Puglia coastline" -- is still ruled, or remembered, through wonder. When Concetta, the mistress of Don Francesco Falcone, the town's biggest landowner, gives birth to a son (after a string of unwanted girls), she screams so loudly that she breaks all the jars of olive oil stored in their basement. The rest of the town is starving, as usual, so they rejoice in this yellow flood, lapping it from cobblestones and cherishing the memory forever. Alas, the much-longed-for son turns out to be a detestable little jerk, but by then we are well-launched into the chronicle of this family, which includes all those wacky young females, who are always doing something like running off with the parish priest and stealing the family fortune. The daughter to remember here is Albina, who eventually gives birth to Candida, who will marry and have another flock of kids, including Alba, a prim-faced pain in the neck who is fond of eating one grape and calling it a meal, who can't stand to be touched, hates dirt and will be the first female in the family to go away to school, where she will meet a petty teenage tyrant, self-appointed queen, who will, in turn, inspire a namesake in Alba's daughter, Gioia. I'm afraid I'm not doing justice to this charming little book, but whether the reader will enjoy it depends on his or her ability to decipher all the gnarled branches of a very involved family tree. (And the family tree provided in the front only contributes to the confusion, since it purports to be handwritten, with cryptic asides: "The underlined name is yours. And me, well, I'm not there yet.") But if you can let go of any need to know who everyone is and whom they're related to, the story just lollops along, and when you get to Rocco, for instance, the son of Lucrezia, all you really have to know is that he's important to the novel and that you need to keep track of him. Meanwhile, the novel tells the history of modern Italy. These peasants, Venezia claims, are perhaps the descendants of Cro-Magnon man: Humans were living in limestone caves in these parts long before anyone thought of keeping records. After them came "the dispossessed of all races: Albanian refugees, Greek monks, heretics, Jews fleeing oppression. . . . They had one thing in common: hunger." Then comes the massacre of outlaw bandits from 1861 to '63, and in 1915 Italy enters World War I. Then Fascists rise, along with communists. Rocco (remember him?), after some years in a seminary, becomes first a Fascist and then, for a time, a communist, thus summing up the three main strains of Italian thought. Then comes World War II and after that, 1950s land reform. By this time, Rocco has married Alba (she of the one-grape breakfast), and they have one daughter, whom Alba names after the schoolgirl tyrant from long ago -- Gioia. It is this Gioia, it turns out, whom the story is really about. She leaves home and experiences many adventures and misadventures, which are meant to demonstrate, I suppose, how the superstition and custom that have kept the rural population in one place for so many years have lost power. At last, these people can move into the contemporary world. I guess you'd have to say this book isn't for everyone. You need to be interested in the past and interested in Italy -- far beyond the compulsory three-week vacation in Tuscany. This isn't a book about surface charm or old-world villas. This is about how families remember what happened to them, about who did what to whom, about how our idiosyncrasies often grow to mask whomever we may be as actual human beings. (Alba is remembered for not eating and then for becoming a world-class clean-freak: She's always seen in the background scrubbing a floor or polishing silver; she hates dirt so much she pours cement over her garden.) Gioia, the one who does the remembering here, is portrayed with every possible tender nuance. In an afterword, the author thanks her father for his research and mentions the town of Grottole by name. We are meant to take this novel as actual history -- in bewitching disguise.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Striking and Unique
This is a novel of both people--five generations of a family--and a place--Italy, beginning in 1861--, but weight that mostly towards the people. Though the setting is fixed, the real focus is on the individuals, on the flux of personalities within a family and political divisions (the family progresses through communism, fascism, socialism...).

The smallest decisions and fixations can entirely shift self-definition and the lifetime alliances and rivalries that spring up in a single household are quickly experienced; there are sudden, dramatic exits, revelations, pariahs, secrets, affairs...
Like other big-family novels (Midnight's Children, 100 Years of Solitude) it sometimes transcends the real, but I would hesitate to say magically. It's more a work of believable slight-surrealism, where the atmosphere shifts towards a place familiar but pleasantly foreign:

"When Gioia was a little older, her grandmother Lucrezia would bring her swallows from the fields, their wings and beaks snipped. She would tie them to the balcony rail so that Gioia could watch them flitter around clumsily, trying helplessly to fly. In August Lucrezia bought cicadas, which she placed under an overturned glass. They would sing until they ran out of air and died of asphyxiation. And she brought lightning bugs which filled the darkness above the chest of drawers in her room with a delicate, greenish light."

It is filled with striking and unique images--it begins with a scene of hundreds of tons of olive oil rolling down the hill from the village center, past a young boy walking a rat on a leash, for example--and a roaring-river momentum of births, loves, and deaths, surprisingly packaged into a non-epic 256 pages.

Though this is Mariolina Venezia's first novel, it was a bestseller and prizewinner in Italy, and this translation is strong.

Birth. Life. Death. Infinity.
Stark and powerful, this novel addresses the fortunes and failures visited to all families; herein seen through the history and generations of the family of Don Francesco Falcone. There are traits and entanglements, lusts and liaisons, and the external historical influences that challenge survival. Seemingly innocuous decisions are made that alter the family for future generations. Thought provoking and easily readable, this novel/family history reminds us all "we've been here a thousand years."