Breaking the Mould by Penny Petrone (review)

546 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 the same line, >Sanfgirolamo= on page 121, >tact= where he means tack (203), >trasmettteva= (290) B to give a random sampling. Ricci should have consulted someone who knew Kipling=s Kim. Calvino=s reference to Kim travelling India >col vecchio Lama Rosso= is translated >with the old man Red Blade,= rather than with the old Lama (priest) of the Red-Hat sect. The index may shake my faith more than that of others, since all the errors I found concerned my own listing: I appear on page 26, not 23, as stated in the index; I appear unindexed on page 152, and the bibliography lists something of mine not caught by the index, so I cannot find where it might have been referred to. Other entries, checked at random, were where they purported to be. Such errors do not really undercut one=s sense that this is a well-argued book that brings out some of Calvino=s strangeness and gives very persuasive labels to its characteristics. Ricci felicitously claims that >as a storyteller [Calvino=s] prose attempted to explore the black hole that is the centre of word and image relations.= I think Calvino would have enjoyed this Qfwfq-like project. One need not travel beyond our galaxy to find black holes in need of being experienced and described. (KATHRYN HUME) Penny Petrone. Breaking the Mould Guernica. 176. $10.00 Penny Petrone is best known as a pioneer in the study of Aboriginal literature in Canada, having produced two important anthologies and a literary history, Native Literature in Canada. For this work, she was made an honorary chief of the Gull Lake Ojibway. Another memoir, Embracing Serafina (2000), deals with her adult life; this book recounts her childhood and youth as the daughter of Calabrese immigrants to what is now Thunder Bay. Her parents are imposing figures B both hard-working, the father funloving , the mother God-fearing, and both loving their five children in ways that do not always accord with North American norms. For Serafina (Penny=s given name), most things Italian, including her name, were a mixed blessing. Port Arthur=s establishment was not welcoming: the president of the Rotary Club was once reported as saying, >All boys and girls born in the coal docks miss something that we had as boys and girls B the inherited idea of law, order and constitutional government!= But the children of the >tough= south end roamed freely in safety, and doors were not locked in neighbourhoods of Finnish, Swedish, Scottish, English, and other immigrants who formed almost 60 per cent of the city=s population in 1920. Although the parents did not mix much, their children became friends; Petrone even learned some words of Finnish and spent some time tutoring a Chinese laundry owner to read English. The Canadian government did not humanities 547 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 particularly want Italians as permanent settlers, seeing them as being at the lower end of the social order, suited only for >pick and shovel work.= And the Italian government, dominated by northern Italians, did not concern itself over-much with their welfare. Gli Americani assumed they would make money in North America and then return home. However, Calabria was a hard land, and most eventually threw their lot in with the new country, turning from farming to small business, construction, or resource industry work. Petrone=s father was seriously injured three times, once in a dynamite blast, once crushed between an icebreaker and a breakwater wall, and once run over by a dump truck. But he survived. Petrone=s mother nowadays would be acclaimed as a Calabrian Martha Stewart, sewing, knitting, gardening, preserving, cooking, baking, recycling; she was the canny one, eventually saving up enough of their money to buy an apartment block. She was the one who gathered the children around her to say the rosary every evening. Both lived active and fulfilling lives, even in the shadow of social disapproval that appeared to fall more heavily on their children, more concerned with assimilation. The book is...