marina warner's the lost father; modern italy; recording intergenerational stories

Major spoilers for: Marina Warner’s The Lost Father, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

Minor spoilers for: Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.

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Recently, I picked up a yellowed copy of Marina Warner’s novel The Lost Father (1988) on a used books cart, and I’m happy I did. I first heard of Warner when Helen Oyeyemi mentioned one of her writings as an influence in writing Mr. Fox¹, and I mostly came to know her for her criticism and nonfiction about fairy tales. So I was intrigued to learn that she’d written a novel. (To give some idea of what she’s most famous for, Warner’s Wikipedia page says she is a “historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer.”)

Sort of like how I can’t seem to figure out a way to describe Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet as anything but “two girls grow up together in Naples,” The Lost Father is about a family growing up in Italy. There’s some similarities here with Ferrante in that both works’ narrators are themselves authors, writing about the people close to them, and they’re not quite reliable. They’re also both set in 20th-century Italy, although The Lost Father starts in the 1910s (much earlier than Ferrante’s quartet) and ends in the narrator’s present time in the ‘80s. More on this later, although I wanted to note this was all a surprise to me and that surprise is one of the reasons I’ve been buying whatever catches my eye in bookstores lately rather than trying to perfectly curate what I read. My copy doesn’t even have a blurb, so I didn’t expect this 1988 English-language novel by a British author to be an intergenerational saga about an Italian family—not that I expected it to be about anything in particular at all.

As I would expect for someone of her reputation, Warner’s prose is delightful, in an Angela Carter-esque way but with less magical realism and more focus on bringing magic to mundane everyday things. It’s so lovely to read, and I had to savor it, so it took me a few weeks to get through all of it. For example, here’s a passage on pg. 8 describing Davide, the title character, shaving his face:

The razor skimmed off the lather, dirtying its warm whiteness with the pepper of his beard’s growth – he was working from the outside in, from ear to lip, checking at his moustache, and then from neck up to chin. There was a tricky passage, over the cleft in his chin, and he sucked in his mouth to stretch the flesh there as smooth as it would go and and stuck his tongue under his bottom lip to fill out that indentation too; the razor’s length made it difficult to enter these dimples and valleys. The barber in town used a smaller blade to smooth these places and sometimes laid two threads in parallel lines, one on each side of the offending remnant of stubble, and then, with the ends firmly caught between his teeth, twiddled until the hair came up by the roots, pinched between the strands. But this was not a finesse that could be performed on oneself, he knew, to his regret, for the father appreciated a close shave, and loved to feel the naked satin of his cheek and jaw after a visit to the chair in town.

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A few days after I started reading the book, I also watched Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), which was a strange contrast. Like The Lost Father, Pinocchio is set during Fascist-era Italy; this retelling of the original fairy tale has been controversial because of del Toro’s decision to “make it political” (although given his reputation, that decision shouldn’t be a surprise), including poor Pinocchio spending much of the film trying to avoid getting sent off to fight in World War II, and at one point Mussolini ordering his execution because he doesn’t like Pinocchio’s circus performance. It’s also a film centered on father-son relationships and what it means to be family. Pinocchio spends a lot of it figuring out how to be a good son to Geppetto, and Geppetto a good father to him, especially since this retelling features a Geppetto traumatized by the death of his previous son Carlo, who had always been a perfectly good, normal kid and then died during a bombing. It’s a lot to unpack.

The Lost Father does not have a sentient wooden puppet, a talking cricket, or any of the other fantastical elements of Pinocchio, but it’s also a story about a family just trying to survive during Mussolini’s reign. I like that a lot of it is very mundane—like, there’s no Hunger Games-esque revolution where Pinocchio rises up and overthrows Mussolini or something.² He’s obviously not a fan of him, but his own story is focused on his love for his father, not saving the world, so Fascism is an antagonist but also a backdrop.

In The Lost Father, the narrator’s mother reflects on growing up fatherless with her sisters and says:

People forget, these days, when everyone wants to be on The Price is Right and have their instant fame and shout their piece. Sometimes silence is the only way. If you have others who depend on you. For heavensake’s, not everyone can be a hero. And I don’t have to tell you about the Fascists…perhaps we were cowards. Ostriches. Snails, hiding in our shells. But we were on our own, and we were women.

It would be a cliché to comment on the relevance to current events.

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The novel has an interesting, interwoven sort of narrative structure. The narrator, Anna, is the “I,” writing the story of her family; the story she is writing is in third person, spanning multiple decades and many different characters, and it’s told nonlinearly. There’s also some excerpts from Davide’s diary. There’s also the “you,” Anna’s mother, Fantina, so the book is addressed to her, but Fantina is referred to in third person in the parts that are presented as the story of her family. (It’d be cool to see more family sagas experiment with structure like this! Just because it’s historical doesn’t mean it has to be linear.)

A brief note on the book’s biographical aspects: both Marina Warner and Anna are historians born to Italian mothers and British fathers. However, I’m not super interested in wondering how biographical or “true” a story is (whatever that means), especially because Warner’s corpus is mostly history/criticism. If she was the sort of author who was writing memoir after memoir and giving interviews about her personal life, I’d probably think about this differently.

Anna is an archivist. She works in the Ephemera wing of a British museum of children’s materials (games, children’s books, etc.), so her job title is Curator of Ephemera, which is one of the coolest job titles I’ve ever heard. Her desire to write the novel comes from her desire to preserve, to record, but it’s challenging because so much has been lost to time and wasn’t documented thoroughly. Davide’s own diaries are mostly from later in his life, so her extensive writing about his childhood is mostly based on her mother’s fragmented recollections, which aren’t that reliable (Davide, Fantina’s father, died only at age 38, when Fantina was still young).

For much of the novel, Anna tries to piece together the story of an injury Davide sustained when he was 19, which caused the long-term health problems that eventually killed him at age 38. The story she writes, and which Fantina had told her, was that Davide dueled his friend Tommaso because Tommaso insulted one of his sisters, leading to Davide getting shot. Anna likes this version of events—it’s romantic and grand and it makes for a good story. However, at a big family reunion near the end of the novel, Anna’s cousin says he’d been told Davide got that injury during a different sort of altercation, when Tommaso had seen him coming from far away and, knowing he was coming to confront him, shot him without warning.

Then Anna writes to another cousin, Pia (the daughter of Davide’s sister Rosa, who supposedly had been in love with Tommaso and maybe caused the duel), who knows almost nothing about her family history. Pia goes through Rosa’s stuff and mails back a news clipping about a workers’ rights protest the year Davide got shot, in which some students hiding in a quarry (including one anonymous law student who had helped the workers) were shot and wounded by police. This matches the description of Davide, who studied law. The duel was also set in a quarry.

I personally really enjoy this version. Teenage Rosa is initially presented as this lovesick romantic girl who’s too smitten with Tommaso to see that he’s bad news, but the adult Rosa unexpectedly became super invested in workers’ rights and was a huge labor rights activist in America. This version provides a possible explanation by implying that her older brother getting shot by police over labor rights inspired her to take up the cause, and suggests that that lovesick Rosa never existed.

Anna and her mother discuss what version of the story she really wants to present, although at this point we already know, because the story of the duel takes up much of the first part and we’re only just learning about the other versions at the end. (I swear the book’s chronology and structure is not as confusing as I’m making it sound from this also very nonlinear recollection.) They agree that they really can’t know, and that they like the story of the duel. Anna writes, “Anyway, you brought me up to believe this was the story of our family, this was your past, and I am trying to preserve your memories, so I’ll stick to it with you.”

The preservation of your family’s memories is something I think a lot about nowadays. Now that I’m in my twenties and my parents have decided I’m not a totally sheltered little girl anymore (or at least that’s my guess for their reasoning), they’ve started offhandedly mentioning things I had never known before about our family, the kind of stuff I usually expect to come across by reading some Nobel Laureate’s novel about the Cultural Revolution. I mentioned this to a friend once and she was like, “yeah, once during lunch my mom casually mentioned how hard it’d been to get food during [her home country’s] genocide a few decades ago, and I was like, wait, what?” I really have no idea how to ever talk to my parents, or really any older person, about that sort of thing. I don’t know what I’d say. They don’t see it as some grand story or something for the history books, it was just their lives, and also it sucked so why bring it up?

One of Anna’s aunts, Imma, says to her about the book she’s writing: “They were terrible times, darling. Why write about those times? When things now are so much better. This is what our Mamma worked for us to have, nice homes, nice children, plenty to eat now and pretty clothes to wear. It was terrible then.”

And it really was terrible! Fantina and her sisters spend much of their childhood struggling to put food on the table. When they move to New York, Davide and his wife, Maria Filippa, argue over Maria Filippa dumpster diving from hotels to get food; Davide is upset that Maria Filippa feels the need to resort to such measures when it’s his role to be the provider. There’s one scene where Maria Filippa has to go to the town square to donate her wedding ring to be melted into gold for war helmets, which is particularly heart-wrenching since Davide has died. In comparison, Anna and her cousins have only ever been comfortable. Their mothers, who once didn’t have enough to eat, have married, settled down into affluent lives, and achieved the essence of the American Dream. (At one point, one of Anna’s aunts exclaims in delight over getting to use her dishwasher.)

One of my coworkers, A, has a Chinese-Japanese mother who used to live in Hawaii. Once A asked if she wanted to go back and visit, and her mother replied, “No. I already lived there.” They already lived through it, didn’t they—why relive it?

Relatedly, it’s interesting to read about diasporic experiences from other cultures, since as a Chinese immigrant, my own frame of reference largely derives from that. Fantina’s family first moves from Italy to the USA, then back to Italy, then most of the sisters move to the USA again, while Fantina raises her family in England. It’s also interesting to read how they view Americans, and their take on the general concept of America. My parents moved from China to the USA (where I was born), then back to China (with me in tow), and then I moved back to the USA as an adult, so I also enjoy reading about this sort of traversing and re-traversing between two countries, which I don’t see often represented (shoutout to Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being for that representation, which is one of my favorite books).

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Back to Ferrante, whose work is an interesting contrast. Elena, the narrator of the Neapolitan Quartet, writes the story of her friendship with Lila as a method of bringing her back—a sort of emotional resurrection—after Lila leaves her. The quartet spans decades of their lives, and depending on how you see it, her determination to preserve her memories of Lila (with a rather dubious level of truthfulness) is a gesture of love, or betrayal, or a secret third thing. I’ll note I actually have not read the fourth novel yet and will probably go crazy when I do since I have cried a lot already reading the first three. Anyway.

In The Lost Father, Anna clearly loves her mom, and there are several present-day conversations between them in the novel, meaning Fantina gets a voice while Lila (and many other fictional muses, e.g. Humbert Humbert’s Lolita) does not. In the novel’s opening pages, Anna reads Fantina some of the story she’s writing, and Fantina gives her opinion. Most of the novel actually is not about Fantina, though. The novel is titled for—and spends the plurality of its oxygen on—the long-dead Davide. The rest is divided among various other family members.

It also reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon, which as you might expect from the title + author combination, is also a recollection of an Italian family’s life during Fascist Italy. Unfortunately, Family Lexicon was not half as compelling to me, as it really did also live up to the “lexicon” part of its title. I felt like I was just reading a long list of disconnected vignettes, with nothing to thread it together. Ginzburg’s family knew a lot of pretty notable Italian intellectuals (many of whom got in trouble with the regime) so the novel’s an interesting window into that, and her recollection of her father’s strong, eccentric personality is compelling, but overall I didn’t enjoy my reading experience. Her novella The Dry Heart was great though, so I’d still give her other writing a chance.

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My copy of The Lost Father has price tags from two different used bookstores in NYC (including the one I bought it from), and it would have also been sold firsthand at some point, so I enjoy that it’s probably travelled through three different bookstores to reach me. That feels fitting. It was yellowed and a bit crinkled and curled at the edges, but in perfectly good and readable condition, without even a highlight in sight, although that is no longer the case—I delight in annotating.

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The epigraph to the novel is an shortened version of Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “My Faithful Mother Tongue,” which I find captures the novel’s themes quite well. I also find the shortening itself interesting. You can find the full version here, but below is the text as it’s presented in the novel:

Faithful mother tongue,
I have been serving you.
Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colours
so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch
as preserved in my memory.

This lasted many years.
You were my native land; I lacked any other.
I believed that you would also be a messenger
between me and some good people
even if they were few, twenty, ten
or not born, as yet. . .

Faithful mother tongue,
perhaps after all it’s I who must try to save you.
So I will continue to set before you little bowls of colours
bright and pure if possible,
for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty.