In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano, tr. Brian Robert Moore, is published by Pushkin Press.
“For me, to write has always been to pluck from the dense and complex fabric of life, some image, from the noise of the world one note, and surround them with silence,” wrote Lalla Romano in A Silence Shared. Indeed, In Farthest Seas is strung from plucked details, simply and finely formed in Romano’s crystalline prose. Or perhaps, the book is not a collection of details, but a singular, prolonged note: a sustained hum of love for Innocenzo Monti, Romano’s husband of fifty years. Her account of their love and relationship is quasi-memoir, an early and intimate whispering of autofiction.
The novel divides into two parts: in the first, a young Lalla falls in love with Innocenzo, although it is less a falling, and more a climbing, since the lovers discover each other on Alpine Club excursions through high mountains. “The next day we climbed – with our skis – the glacier under the Maledia, all the way to the Pagarì Pass. Up there, crouched close together for warmth, we stayed awhile: to contemplate, in the sky, a city. A city of clouds. It must have changed, as clouds do, but so imperceptibly, it seemed still, immutable. Far away, but not too far. Distinctly visible were domes, obelisks, minarets: an eastern city. Its colours were delicate, soft: orange-pink, violet.” Romano’s voice in this section is fittingly breathless, hurrying after the naïve and flighty exaltations of early love. In Innocenzo’s image, as he chops wood or tells a story, one hand held against his chest, Romano finds “that guarantee of a wild life, a free and far-off life“. With Innocenzo, she sweeps towards wildness, feeling, “whether in her core or where“, that she is “wild“.
In part two, Romano recounts Innocenzo’s final four months of life, after a period of illness and fifty years of marriage. Romano’s voice is steadier in this section, and more restrained, arriving in deliberate strokes of truth about love, age, devotion and dying. There is a sense, in this part, of having crossed, at last, over a mountain pass, from which one must descend gingerly. Indeed, Romano writes, “Life – ours – had reached a summit“. The subject of this part (the book’s far longer section) is loss, but it is a warm and hopeful loss; Romano expresses deep and beautiful satisfaction and wonder at having loved and been loved at all. “I am not cold“, she writes, “I am still wrapped in the rough wool of his sweetness“.
And so that rough wool tufts the upper of Italy’s boot: towns, street names and mountains in Piedmot are the setting of Romano’s memories. In Via Barbaroux, Romano shared a room with Silvia, her sister. In Madonna del Colletto, Romano once “saw the moon suspended in the middle, like a host“. To the hut on Pagarì mountain, Lalla and Innocenzo return often until Innocenzo’s illness. These places are hardly described, so that the reader feels intimately involved, addressed like an old friend from childhood, found again after a lifetime apart.
“It was not in illnesses that I feared losing him; but in absences, in distance. To die is to move off into the distance: I’d find this out later.”
There is something faltering about Romano’s prose, exquisitely preserved by Brian Robert Moore in his translation. Romano breaks her sentences so often into short, comma-ed, bracketed, colon-ed clauses, so that their rhythm takes you constantly by surprise. It is as though she is discovering, in each line, sentences themselves. Each clause gives way unexpectedly to another, as though rounding a tight (mountain) bend at each pause. The result is a rhythm so particular and inimitable, which, explains Moore, a reader “must be willing to follow”. When they do, they will find a pace, disobedient in its capriciousness, that spits and sparks with life.
Romano’s short, page-length chapters, framed by thick borders, are like single leaves of paper, translucent when held up to light, and stacked in a tower of fine sheets that might slip in your breath into disorder. For it has that quality, Romano’s prose and her love story, of old, creased paper – ephemeral in its fragility, saved in a pocket or in a book for some reason once upon a time, and from then on, inexplicably precious, although it is not, in itself remarkable. Indeed there is little extraordinary about Romano’s marriage to Innocenzo, no more at least, than the usual wonder of love that holds fast through awkward sex, forgotten wedding anniversaries, small jealousies, and stories told again and again. In a way, it is these stories, told again and again by Innocenzo to Lalla, that are most celebrated here. The “little story” at the “fork in a valley“, of the old man hoeing, the single egg Innocenzo would cook himself for lunch, and another for lunch, while he studied in Milan. These ordinary details, hardly stories, are held and coddled by Romano, and reconfigured, jewel-like for us, showing us so delicately, how to love and be loved, even when a lover has crossed farthest seas.
Reviewed by Rosa Picard for BookBlast®
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