Guesswork

January 16, 2017
Cooley’s (Thirty-Three Swoons) touching memoir recounts a year living in the rural Italian village of Castiglione del Terziere, a castle town, where—in the off-season—there are only a dozen or so residents. Cooley and her husband Antonio, both fiction writers and translators, take a leisurely approach to country living. Though the book begins as a love letter to Castiglione, it turns into an introspective family memoir. Cooley meditates on her parents’ deteriorating health and contemplates the deaths of friends—a “rabbit hole of loss”—that preceded her move to Italy. Once in Italy, she visits the Costa Concordia shipwreck, gets to know the other women in town, and becomes deeply familiar with the cats of Castiglione. In the midst of tragedy, Cooley finds solace in literature and poetry, quoting poets such as Zbigniew Herbert, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Philip Larkin. Her devotion to her mother is intertwined with her devotion to literature. As her mother slowly goes blind, their shared love of reading, or listening to books, unites them. Like the ill-fated Costa Concordia, Cooley must learn to “steer amidst obstacles,” and though her passage is not always smooth, it is instructive and humanizing.

March 1, 2017
The author of the honored novel The Archivist (1998) returns with a sometimes-wrenching memoir-in-essays about love and loss.Cooley (English/Adelphi Univ.; Thirty-Three Swoons, 2005, etc.), a translator and an editor for the literary journal A Public Space, writes here about a caesura of 14 months in a small Italian village with her husband, a period that gave her time to travel a bit, to ruminate about loss (a writer friend, the decline of her parents, an ill neighbor who lives in a castle in the town, and more). The author also writes about local events (the wreckage of a cruise ship lies not far away) and animals (cats, birds, a fox that kills some goslings), and she quotes many lines from notable poets, including T.S. Eliot (principally), Whitman, Dickinson, Galway Kinnell, among others. Cooley moves stealthily around in time, using the shifts as both ally and enemy. She uses time to tell her story, shaping it to fit her needs, but she also fears time and what it has done and continues to do. (Her father suffers from Alzheimer's; her mother has gone slowly blind; she thinks about her own aging.) Cooley also shifts tenses frequently and even changes person: in one affecting passage, she employs the "you" of the second person. Throughout, the author navigates leisurely through her year abroad, recounting how she and her husband drove to the mountains to hike, visited the local cemetery, interacted kindly with feral cats, ate local food, and tried to work on a new novel. But visitors from her memory keep intruding and demanding her attention. Most prominent among them are her parents, now in an assisted living facility, and the author is devastated that she is losing them both. A quiet memoir with emotional power that is subtle, artful, and piercing.

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