A Circular Journey

Front Cover
Fordham Univ Press, 2006 - Biography & Autobiography - 210 pages

A Circular Journey collects for the first time in one book the essays that most powerfully define the unique gifts of one of America's most distinctive voices.

These fifteen pieces, tracking some thirty years of a writer's life, come together to illuminate the stages and themes and places that mark Helen Barolini's art. Divided into three closely linked sections--"Home," "Abroad," "Return,"--the essays move through Barolini's worlds. Her love of literature began when, as a child growing up as an avid reader in Syracuse, New York, she was presented with a diary and told to write in it. Returning to the heritage of her Italian immigrant grandparents, she moved to Italy as a young writer. There she lived for many years, becoming acquainted with the brightest of Italy's literary lights. The accomplished poet, novelist, and critic she became now lives at home in two nurturing cultures, America and Italy both.

The essays are memoirs of her house on a street named for Henry James's grandfather, tales of literary journeys from Taos to Taormina, and Paris to Rome, as the young bride of a poet from the Veneto and, later on, as a distinguished writer whose explorations of identity and dislocation took her back to Italian inspirations.
From a delightful account of a writing fellowship in an exquisite villa overlooking the Italian lakes to her first trip back to discover distant family roots in the hills of Calabria, Barolini moves lyrically through the generations of her life, giving form to the influences that shaped her art and her sense of self--as an American, a woman, and a gifted daughter of the two cultures she has so powerfully imagined.

Praise for Helen Barolini

"An impassioned and magnificent contribution to our knowledge of what it has meant and means still to be an ethnic American and woman . . . . a book of heroic recovery and affirmation."--Alice Walker (on The Dream Book)

"Large in scope, in depth, and in the gift of narrative."--Cynthia Ozick (on Umbertina)

From inside the book

Contents

James Street
3
My Mothers Wedding Day
33
Zio Filippo at Summer Camp
50
A Fish Tale
69
Sicily Light and Dark
89
Neruda vs Sartre by the Sea
110
Being at Bellagio
131
Shutting the Door on Someone
155
A Story of Rings
174
A Circular Journey
188
Copyright

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Page 17 - University, wrote the following words, which would come back to haunt him in his subsequent political campaigns: [N]ow there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland...
Page 18 - ... now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence...
Page 93 - ... Courage goes a long way. Stay gay, and don't slip into that depression. I am doing a novel — amuses me — perhaps I shall even finish it. The worst of Taormina is that it is a parterre of English weeds all cultivating their egos hard, one against the other. Imagine nettle overtopping dandelion, the languors and lilies of virtue here very stiff and prickly, the roses and raptures of vice a little weedy and ill developed.
Page 96 - To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.
Page 202 - Magna Graecia), or from one who cards wool, and, if this last, in Italian one who is a carder is a tease (a "card"?) and, worse, a backbiter. This meaning derives from the Latin cardus, thistle, whose prickles were used to card wool; then, figuratively, the meaning extends to include the prickles of a verbal barb, as in bad-mouthing. Which might have given my mother a certain luster that her soft Mollica weepiness did not.
Page 206 - One sees them with melancholy pleasure; one is in some sort of a hurry to admire them. Thoughts of the savage, natural grandeur that is going to come to an end, become mingled with splendid anticipations of the triumphant march of civilisation. One feels proud to be a man...
Page 11 - ... of massive buildings in all directions — crowded, too, with people, all full of life and activity! Nine years before I had passed a day here, among some five or six scattered tenements, one of which had just been erected, and was then occupied by my friend Joshua Forman,1 Esq. ; the whole being surrounded by a desolate, poverty-stricken, woody country, enough to make an owl weep to fly over it.
Page 141 - So, little by little, time brings out each several thing into view, and reason raises it up into the coasts of light. For they saw one thing after another grow clear in their mind, until by their arts they reached the topmost...

About the author (2006)

Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, poet, Helen Barolini is the recipient of numerous prizes, including an NEA grant and an American Book Award. Her books include Umbertina; The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian-American Women; and More Italian Hours, and Other Stories. She lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.