Gathering the Family, and: Christ Stopped at Eboli, and: The Road to San Giovanni (review)

210Fourth Genre deep inteUigence. The reader wiU learn a good bit about the author. The reader wiU not, however, learn how to grow dahlias. Dear Friend & Gardener: Letters on Life and Gardening, by Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd. Frances Lincoln (U.K.), 1998. 254 pages, cloth, $22.95. Chatto and Lloyd are two ofthe best known gardeners in England. Both have written widely, and extremely weU, on their own gardens and gardening philosophies. They have been gardening, at opposite corners ofEngland, for over 50 years, and appear genuinely to be friends. Here again, chronology rules, as these letters were written over the course oftwo calendar years. They were written expressly for publication and despite the self-consciousness of the format (and occasionaUy of the writers) the book succeeds. The writers are at once writing to each other andfor the unknown reader. They can be, and are, informal, but they also recognize their obligation to provide context and formal explanation for that unseen reader—and findingjust the right tone for this double mission is tricky. The friends exchange new ideas for plantings, commiserate about the weather, rage at the depredations of visitors—human and otherwise—reminisce about other friends and other gardens. Their voices differ, their gardens and gardening styles differ, aU of which adds spice to their interaction. Here the reader may learn a fair bit about dahlias, and the book contains a thorough index—which teUs one something about English garden readers. Robert L. Root Jr. I'm continuaUy struck by the power of the memoir and the essay to evoke period and place. This power stretches across cultures, as these three books, one American and two Italian, demonstrate. Gathering the Family, by WiUiam Holtz. University of Missouri Press, 1997. 172 pages, paper, $14.95. Having referred often in classes and conference presentations to WiUiam Holtz's essay, "Brother's Keeper," I was happy to see his coUection of essays Book Reviews211 about his famüy and his experiences growing up in Michigan. "Brother's Keeper" is divided into 13 sections, most of which begin with a variation of the sentence, "My brother now is dead," a Une that builds the power ofinvocation over the course of the essay; the segments accumulate in force as they wresde with loss and responsibUity Other essays are also about loss, the death ofhis father, the death ofhis mother, the disappearance and death ofa feUow Forest Service worker, but the essayist's eye is also on his own understanding and response to these deaths. In "The Girl With the Golden Giggles" he attempts to sort out the evidence ofhis mother's life from clues—letters, cards, photographs—that introduce him to a woman other than the glum, taciturn person he remembers. Holtz's essays are neither confessional nor self-absorbed but rather the kind ofhonest and open investigative reporting ofhis own life that most of us could weU imagine doing with our own personal histories. Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi, translated by Frances Frenaye. Noonday Press, 1995. 268 pages, paper, $13.00. Carlo Levi, a doctor, painter, and writer, was exiled to a primitive undeveloped viUage in southern Italy as a punishment for his opposition to the Mussolini regime. This book is the account of his stay in Gagliano, in the province of Lucania. He is subjected to the pettiness of bureaucrats and party functionaries but within the terms ofhouse arrest has enough freedom to observe the struggles ofthe peasants to make ends meet in a desolate and unforgiving landscape. He paints a verbal portrait of the landscape and the interior lives ofits inhabitants that works simultaneously as ajournai ofpersonal experience and an insightful ethnography. This is one of the great memoirs of time and place, a document of observation that goes beyond "immersion reportage," no matter how unintentional Levi's immersion was, to become a major literary work ofnonfiction. The Road to San Giovanni, by Italo Calvino, translated byTim Parks.Vintage, 1994. 150 pages, paper, $12.00. This posthumously published coUection offive "memory exercises," what the Italian noveUst himself called "passaggi obbligati," is as much an exploration of the nature of memory as an attempt at memoir. "Memories of a...