All This Talk of Love

December 24, 2012
In all the 50 years that Maddalena Grasso has been married to Antonio, never once have they returned to their homeland, Italy. That changes when their daughter, Prima, a devoted wife and mother, secretly buys tickets to Rome for the whole family. Through all the back-and-forth over the trip, the truth about the suicide years ago of Maddalena and Antonio’s son, Tony, comes out. As if by the hand of fate, Prima and her son, injured in a car accident, are forced to cancel their trip. Only then does the family realize that Maddalena is developing Alzheimer’s. The trip to Italy suddenly takes on greater significance: there, Maddalena can reconcile with her estranged relatives and find peace before passing away. Castellani’s sentimental new novel (after The Saint of Lost Things) is an intimate family portrait that never quite connects. Maddalena’s resistance to her home country feels as contrived as Tony’s suicide, and pivotal family secrets are never fully revealed. By the end, no one, except the unfortunate Maddalena, is much changed. Agent: Janet Silver, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.

November 1, 2012
"You have to tend to family like you tend to a garden," writes Castellani (The Saint of Lost Things, 2005, etc.) in his third literary effort. Matriarch Maddalena, "reporting and worrying and complaining and negotiating," needs more care than any other flower in the Grasso family garden. Maddalena is 70-something, still beautiful, still grieving over the death of her first-born son, Tony, and very much the axis of life for husband Antonio, daughter Prima and son Francesco. Antonio is semiretired from his successful restaurant. Prima is well-married to prosperous Tom Buckley and mother of four strapping sons. Much to Maddalena's distress, Frankie, born after Tony's death, is a grad student in faraway Boston, "building additions to the sprawling mansion of his dissertation with the zeal of Bob Vila." There is a certain equilibrium, even though Tony's death was a suicide that left behind guilty secrets in the hearts of Antonio and Prima. Then, Prima uses the celebration of her youngest son's religious confirmation to announce she has bought tickets for the entire family for a sojourn to her parents' ancestral village, Santa Cecilia in Italy. Maddalena angrily dismisses the gift. Refusing to voice her objection, she fears returning to see the beauty of her youth ripped away by reality and to again meet Vito, her first love. Layered over this family conflict are other, more serious catastrophes. Prima and her youngest are seriously injured in an auto accident, an incident that turns her from nurturing and devoted to bitter and angry. Then, Maddalena begins a rapid descent into "old timer's." Castellani writes movingly, affectingly of immigrant life, of the dichotomy of cultures, of the persistence of love across generations.

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Starred review from October 1, 2012

Some might consider the Grasso family codependent. Frankie, a PhD candidate who lives in Boston and is having an affair with his married dissertation adviser, still talks to his mom, Prima, on the phone every night. Prima is the "best friend" of her four sons, the last of whom will soon graduate high school and leave the nest. Trying to keep her family together and fill the pending void, she engineers a family trip to Santa Cecilia, Italy, the birthplace of her parents, Antonio and Maddalena. The trouble is, Maddalena refuses to go. The entire family is haunted by the long-ago death of Maddalena's eldest son, Tony, and no one has the full story as to why he took his own life. VERDICT At turns funny and tragic, Castellani's third novel (after The Saint of Lost Things) recalls similar contemporary family sagas, such as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, but is far less cynical. Literary scholar Frankie reviles sentimentality, and the author manages to stop short of it while still making the story emotionally resonant. This reviewer defies anyone not to fall in love with the Grassos. Recommended.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2012
In his long-awaited third novel, Castellani (The Saint of Lost Things, 2005) plumbs the depths of intricate family life and comes up with realistically complex characters, funny quirks that make utter sense, and an examination of the bonds that can both compel and repel. Maddalena and Antonio Grasso have lived in America for more than 50 years. Maddalena didn't exactly forget about her parents and siblings in Santa Cecilia, Italy, but neither has she visited them. Her own grown children, married mother Prima and grad student Frankie, keep Maddalena's life full as she firmly anchors herself to her family so as not to lose her careful, silently panicked grip on them since the death of oldest son Tony years ago. When Prima concocts the idea to take everyone to Italy to finally visit the homeland none of them has ever seen and to reunite Maddalena with her relatives, the ensuing and unexpected backlash sharply stings. Family histories and secrets reveal themselves a wisp at a time, layered into the story with sugar and plenty of spice by Castellani's evocative writing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)