June 24, 2024
Zancanella (A Storm in the Stars) offers an evocative if lukewarm novel of love and displacement in WWI Italy. Shortly before the war, teenage Carlo Coltura and his father return from a Colorado mining camp to the family home in Trento, in a remote section of Northern Italy. A parallel narrative follows Teresa Miori, a teenage girl who moves from Ulfano to Trento, where she finds work as a servant. One day in town, Carlo has a chance meeting with Teresa. When the war begins, the region is occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces, who conscript Carlo and put him to work on constructing a mountain fortress. To help lift his spirits, he writes letters to Teresa. For her part, Teresa lives uneasily under the Austro-Hungarian soldiers who have taken over the villa where she works. With the war over, she and Carlo meet again by accident in Trento and begin a tentative romance. Zancanella describes the invaders with striking surrealism (a group of caped cyclists look less like soldiers than “infernal specters escaped from a nightmare, or ravens turned into men”), and portrays battle scenes with unflinching realism (Carlo steps on a “grey gobbet he feared was some man’s brains”). Unfortunately, the love affair between Carlo and Teresa is tepid at best and ends on an unsatisfying note. Readers will be disappointed.
July 1, 2024
The Italian Alps serve as the setting for this quiet chronicle of lives affected, and ruined, by war. Related in alternating chapters, the stories of Carlo Coltura and Teresa Miori--loosely based on Zancanella's family history--unfold over the years around World War I. American-born Carlo, the son of immigrants who had traveled to Colorado to make their fortune in gold, returns with his widowed father to the small Italian mountain village of Ulfano after the family experienced some mining success. Teresa, a girl from the same remote village, is sent by her mother to work in a household in the city of Trento after her father deserted the household. When Carlo is sent to boarding school in Trento, their paths fleetingly intersect in a meeting that provides Carlo with hope and inspiration during the ensuing war and his conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army. Carlo's years at war are spent in mining operations and illustrate the brutal costs of the construction of military installments on the Italian front. Teresa's war years are spent in her employer's home in the company of the rest of the household staff after the decampment of the owners for safer territory and the subsequent annexation of the home by occupying Austro-Hungarian forces. Teresa's circumstances provide her with an opportunity to prove her own mettle, and she also becomes increasingly involved with caring for animals abandoned or injured during the war. When Carlo and Teresa are reunited after the war, they are faced with negotiating life in a city and culture transformed and must determine how to proceed after living through great trauma. This plainspoken account of the personal and social costs of war displays great empathy for those swept up in its maelstrom. Zancanella's sensitive focus is on a small region but great loss.
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