Paolo Giordano, an Italian particle physicist and author of several acclaimed novels treats us to his latest, in Anne Milano Apple’s liquid translation, Like Family. It’s a quiet, homely (in the old sense ) recollection after the death by cancer of a nanny/housekeeper, of how she became part of a small family –a sweet, small, rainy-day sort of book, to read slowly, pausing to look out a window, to contemplate mortality, and life yet to live.
In fact, there is a sense in which the book was written by a man sitting on a long afternoon at just such a window, writing down passages as they occur to him, not in any lived-order, but as one memory leads to another, sometimes just a re-starting from silence.
Among other pleasures is that the narrator is not an author, or a lawyer or wordsmith of indeterminate income and social location. He is a particle physicist, and one who values human connection above all.
“I had Nora, who understood every nuance of the words I uttered and every implication of those I chose not to say … [And I knew that] all progress made by physics from the beginning–heliocentricsm and Newton’s law of universal gravitation; Maxwell’s synthetic, perfect equations and Planks’s constant; restricted and general relativity; multidimensional twisted strings and the most remote pulsars–all the glories of those discoveries taken together would not be enough to give me the same sense of satisfaction.
[I’m curious about the original Italian in some of this. The accepted way of referring to Einstein’s two theories of relativity are ‘special’ and ‘general,’ not ‘restricted.’ ]
Though all is not perfect between them:
“As far as Nora is concerned, my rationality is only an embellished from of cynicism, one the things that irritates her about me.
There are interesting passages about the old ways passing, leaving the couple in a world without their leavening. The deceased Mrs. A’s husband, Renato, had died some years earlier:
Until [his decline] their union had been an orderly one, much more orderly than Nora’s and mine. We were continually trading the roles of husband and wife to the point where we could no longer tell who was responsible for what. Renato drove, Mrs. A. didn’t; Mrs. A. dusted the furniture, Renato didn’t–each task had been assigned to them from the beginning. A marriage lived outside the preestablished roles was foreign to her. It may be that this contributed to the security her presence gave us, because through her we imagined a somewhat shameful nostalgia for an outmoded, simplified model of the family, a model in which everyone does not have to be everything at once … making us feel constantly inadequate no matter what.”
As the narrative moves back and forth in time we get a delightful reminiscence of a first kiss. They are dressed in extravagant wigs “hers about a foot high, shaped like a pineapple, mine with curly gray ringlets.”
“Since we were wearing wigs and I was imitating the broken English of a Russian, in a sense we were and weren’t ourselves, but maybe that’s always the way it was when you kiss someone new on the lips.
[I wonder, if in the original, it was the “broken Italian of a Russian.”]
Sober realization by the narrator of what Mrs. A. does not yet know:
“She has no idea of the destructive power of the poison that will be introduced into her body, the force with which it will wipe out all forms of life and resistance, good or bad, without differentiation. … like a hurricane.
And that she, “a sick elderly woman,” like their own “nervous schoolboy” are both “eager to have all eyes on him for fear of disappearing.”
[Perhaps better, to avoid the awkward “him” referring to her: “both eager to be the center of attention for fear of disappearing.”]
Giordano is a fine craftsman of marvelous, evocative images:
“…the sides of the highway were whitened by a thin layer of fog, as if to suggest the snow that couldn’t make up its mind to fall.”
or
“A family just starting out is sometimes like that: a nebula of self-centerdness in danger of imploding.”
Or about Nora, angry while vacuuming, talking over the noise. She pushes too hard and the cord comes out, “startling her with the silence.”
Written in a smoothly flowing narrative between now and then, we never misunderstand where we are, though sometimes wonder why. Even when the narration shifts from first person past to omniscient present we move easily along, not upset by an eddy line or choppy water. There are some shifts, however, when the first person narrator moves between tenses, that need a pause to keep our center of time and location oriented.
I suggested she join us before or after dinner, whether or not she ate—we would be happy to see her just the same.
“Forget about me,” she cut me off, “Enjoy your holiday and don’t worry.”
Nora and I aren’t at all unworried, however. Without Mrs. A the list of those invited to Christmas eve dinner looms ever more threatening….
I am somewhat surprised at what I’ve written here, as I am not typically fond of such intimate, family stories. I am drawn to big questions, difficult decisions, tests of determination and courage. I was asked to read several books for the translation category of The Northern California Book Awards, and this was one of them. So here I am, saying, I like this book, much more than I had anticipated. [Thank you Anne Milano Appel]
His first book, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, [review forthcoming] I liked even more; the middle child, The Human Body, not so much, despite high anticipation [my review here.]