![]() (“I couldn’t bear the thought of another person, even if she was a loving friend, fulfilling the role that should have been Katherine’s.”) Clichés show up in bunches: “ivory tower,” “uncharted terrain,” “perfect storm” all on one page. Vivid images - when, say, a young mother offers to wet-nurse the infant Isabel - come swaddled in high sentiment. But as grief turns to mourning - from “Underworld” to “Purgatory” in the book’s apt scheme - Luzzi’s grief-induced loneliness turns into therapy-induced self-absorption. That he confesses all this is admirable, and what he has to say about the “electric” quality of grief will be recognizable to readers who have dealt with grief themselves. He’s cut off from the lives of others even when he’s sure it’s time to get on with his own: “It was all part of the loneliness that came with grief: the illusion that it was somehow all a personal challenge.” He’s worn out by the twice-weekly drive between upstate New York and New England (where he lives part time with his mother and his daughter) and by the shabby familiarity of the shore town he thought he had escaped by going to college and Europe and grad school and into the polyglot professoriate. Sure, he’s grateful, but he feels the act of kindness as proof that he lacks a talent for fatherhood. He’s unable to feel much for his baby girl, and his family arranges for his 76-year-old mother to take her in and care for her in Rhode Island. “For the longest time after her death, she became opaque.” Grief leaves him insensate. “A car accident claimed Katherine’s body, but my grief would nearly kill her memory,” he reports. Then come the crash, the grief and the side effects. “The tension between the pronouns says it all: Although the ‘I’ belongs to Dante, his journey is also part of ‘our life.’ We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day.” With a few strokes, Luzzi makes Dante’s opening his own, draws the crucial parallel between Dante’s text and human experience, and points the reader toward the “dark wood” of his or her own life. “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood,” the book begins, naturally. That she doesn’t live again in this heartfelt memoir, even as a muse, makes it something other than the work of art it might have been, and yet it lends the book a raw and unguarded candor. ![]() “Forty-five minutes after Isabel was born, Katherine died” - and Luzzi is thrust into the dark wood that gives his new book a title and a purpose. ![]() Isabel’s mother, Luzzi’s wife, did not survive. Joseph Luzzi is alive, a professor of Italian at Bard College and the author of a 2014 memoir called “My Two Italies.” Alive, too, is his daughter, Isabel, who was delivered, six weeks premature, after her pregnant mother was involved in a car crash. It’s not fair - isn’t the loss of the beloved burden enough? - but it’s the way of art. Cut off from the beloved, condemned to a kind of hell, this writer then must return to the world of “solid things” and make the dead live through literary devices. The author of a grief memoir must do likewise. “The Divine Comedy” is a long poem about a lot of dead people, and Dante, no halfway believer in the hereafter, used his gifts - for speech, for the strong image, for extravagant simile - to bring them to life in words. Beatrice Portinari died at age 24 on June 8, 1290, and dozens of other figures in the “Commedia” were dead by the week in 1300 when Dante, poet and protagonist, crossed over to the other side. ![]()
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