Review

One of the ironies of the Italic-skippered “discoveries” of the Caribbean and the Americas, from the late 15th and to and throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, is that Italy, not yet a modern nation-state, was unable – at first – to execute the continental land-thefts, Indigenous genocides, and the mass rape and pillaging wrought so mercilessly by the major…

Carmela Circelli’s Love and Rain (Guernica, 2023) is a beautifully written novel often soaked in mood. I wanted to swallow it whole, but at the same time, I wanted to savour it. So I read it as slowly as I could. In today’s world, every Italian novel and especially those by women, will inevitably be compared with Elena Ferrante. Yet,…

Michaela Di Cesare’s new play, Extra/Beautiful/U, premiered at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre last November as part of Centaur’s Brave New Looks Selection for the 2023-2024 season. Included in Infinithéâtre’s Pipeline Reading Series in 2017, the play won the company’s Write-on-Q playwriting competition, before making its way to the stage. Extra/Beautiful/U follows Lara (Madeleine Scovil), a native of the Montreal borough of…

In one sense, 1972 is an extension of some of Domenico Capilongo’s past work. Once again, Capilongo writes about growing up Italian, specifically Sicilian, in urban Toronto. He has mined this vein before, for example, in I Thought Elvis was Italian and, in a roundabout way, in his short story collection, Subtitles and Other Stories. What is new in 1972…

While hoeing his garden one day – so the story goes – Saint Francis of Assisi was asked what he would do if Christ was about to return, leading to the end of the world and the last judgement. “I would keep right on hoeing,” said the saint. I was reminded of this story while reading Mark Frutkin’s new book…

I approached Winners and Losers, Darlene Madott’s latest literary offering, with high expectations. Her last book, Dying Times, was a tight braid of narrative that wove together high stakes legal affairs with tense family relations – especially sibling rivalry—while dissecting sensitive issues of life and death, mortality, dignity, and honour. That’s a tough act to follow. But she rises to…

In his latest book, J’Accuse, Poems Versus (Exile Editions, 2021) George Elliott Clarke pulls out all the stops and delivers a book packed with emotional and intellectual punch. It is a multifaceted work: at once a book of poetry, a memoir, an essay and narrative. The mixing of genres perfectly compliments the book’s multi-layered musical richness. The text abounds with…

Among the features of Prof Kenneth Scambray’s new book, Italian Immigration in the American West – 1870-1940, (University of Nevada Press, 2021) that stand out are the episodes he relates that come directly from his family papers. These are by no means gratuitous or filio-pietistic boastings about his own immigrant family. Rather, they are integral to his overall thesis, especially…

Darlene Madott’s latest book of fiction, her eighth, might be titled Dying Times (Exile Editions, 2021), but it’s really all about celebrating life and its quirks – even while under the shadow of mortality, the knowledge that, for some, the end is nigh. In alternating tales that feature three characters approaching death – the narrator’s mother, her law firm mentor…

Since the first acts of creation the roots of civilization have been grounded in the human narrative as “storytelling” and its ability to evidence experience, implicit and explicit, to explain life’s emotive conditions. Such empathy pushed our belief systems to higher levels of consciousness. These insights of our earlier Palaeolithic uncertainties have influenced our imagination to give primal foundation as…

Because Adolf Hitler is the stark monster of 20th-century history, a diabolical warlord who laid waste European Jewry and devastated Europe, and who was grandiose—Wagnerian—in the epic scale of his wanton, apocalyptic bloodshed, Benito Mussolini’s crimes—trumped-up executions and assassinations favoured over industrialized genocide—have rendered him almost a comic-opera figure, a villainous buffoon. Such was Max Gallo’s verdict, three generations ago,…

In the beginning there is a bridge, and we are standing beneath it, “eyelids sutured / over iris by the smooth / starless underbelly / of infrastructure.” We are blind beneath this bridge, this infrastructure; trapped between its belly and the dirt, unable to witness the moon, the stars, and the trees that create a landscape, in which “mischievous magpies…

Captivating and evocative, the graphic memoir Patria: Crescere in tempo di Guerra (The Fatherland: Growing Up in Times of War) by Bruna Martini is set in Fascist Italy before and during World War II. Bruna Martini, author of several graphic novels and illustrated books, tells the true story of her aunt, Graziella Mapelli, a little girl growing up in Italy…

For over 35 years Gianna Patriarca has been writing sensitive ethno-centric poetry about her colourful community of Little Italy in downtown Toronto. She is now widely recognized as an Italo/Canadian treasure across the international literary stage. Gianna Patriarca’s latest book, To The Men Who Write Goodbye Letters (Inanna 2020, 104 pages), is a colourful tapestry of the friends and acquaintances…

A fare da sfondo all’accattivante e suggestivo graphic memoir Patria. Crescere in tempo di guerra (BeccoGiallo, 2020, 230 pagine) è l'Italia durante la guerra e il ventennio fascista. Bruna Martini, autrice di graphic novel e libri illustrati, racconta la storia di sua zia, Graziella Mapelli, una bambina cresciuta in Italia durante il fascismo. READ IN ENGLISH A rendere più autentica…

It was 1811, the year of Napoleon's Comet and the birth of his son. It was a time of a new world order, a time when people held the past in their head and the future in their hands. No better way to describe the inner conflict of the three protagonists in Ann Pearson’s sophisticated historical novel A Promise on…

Eufemia Fantetti’s most recent book, My Father, Fortune-Tellers & Me: A Memoir (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2019) is a gripping outpouring of grief, confusion, pain, and underlying hope. As the author embarks on an emotionally harrowing journey back to her childhood – to her familial roots in post-World-War II Bonefro, a small mountain town in Southern Italy– we are thrown into…

Taras Grescoe presents himself as a travel writer who falls for a place and then looks around for a book idea to justify prolonged dalliance. Shanghai Grand (Harper Collins, 2016) captured the teetering glamour of China’s port city on the eve of the Second World War. His new book, Possess the Air (Biblioasis, 2019) delves into Rome under Mussolini. Definitely not…

Arianna Dagnino was born in Genova, Italy. After Moscow, London, and Boston, she worked in South Africa as a foreign correspondent. In Australia, she earned a PhD in sociology and comparative literature. She currently teaches at the University of British Columbia. Like many of her characters, she shares the nomadic experience. The Afrikaner (Guernica Editions, 2019) is a powerful novel…

In her recent memoir, Monica Meneghetti challenges assumptions about relationships between people – some of the things that bring us together as human beings and some that draw us apart – sometimes with dire consequences. Recently, she sat down with Accenti to discuss her book, her love of food, and her love of life.   Throughout your memoir you address…

They say you can't judge a book by its cover, but the image on the cover of Domenico Capilongo's most recent collection of poems, Send (Guernica Editions, 2017), provides a useful hint about the nature and central themes of the poems in the collection itself: a silhouette of a smartphone floats over a bank of clouds in a blue sky;…

Tony DeSantis was born and raised in the east end of Montreal, Quebec. He grew up in a predominately Francophone neighbourhood but his Italian parents managed to maintain family traditions while assimilating into Canadian society. It is perhaps this unusual Franco-Italo-Canadian upbringing that provided the fodder for his most recent web series, the absurd yet entertaining, Boombats. To create a…

The Pink House and Other Stories (Longbridge Books, 2018) is Montreal writer Licia Canton’s second collection of short stories after Almond, Wine and Fertility (2008). In her latest volume, Canton narrates the lives of ordinary people facing challenging times, drawing from her own personal experiences, as a writer, a daughter, a mother and as an Italian immigrant living in Montreal. With her straightforward…

I’ve turned on my computer to write this review of Terri Favro’s new book, Generation Robot (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018), and I find it challenging to put into words how the book has affected me. Like Terri, I too vividly remember our milk, bread, and eggs arriving at our place by horse-drawn carts, and my mother telling me to announce the arrival so…

In Rene Pappone’s latest novel, The Partisan Brigade, a long-kept secret haunts a man. He still harbours the painful memory of the injustice that embittered his family. If he returns to the place where, in tragic circumstances, he acted against his own beliefs, would he finally find solace? Pasqualino Leone has been asking himself that question ever since he returned to Canada…

Border towns can be grey zones with split identities, regions where loyalties are divided, nations kiss, laws are broken, and boundaries are both enforced and transgressed. As literary settings, borders offer up stories that defy easy categorization: American Jeffrey Eugenides’ Detroit-based novel Middlesex and Canadian Craig Davidson’s Niagara Falls-based Cataract City come to mind as excellent examples of the form. I grew up on…

“Why this story?” They are the first words of Sebastiano's Vine by Carmelo Militano (Ekstasis Editions, 2013), and the first words uttered by the main character and narrator, Michael Filo. It is a question that may have many answers, or no answer at all – a question that brings clearer meaning to a life, or it does not. For readers it is…

The gala to launch the Fellini Spectacular Obsessions Exhibit at TIFF Bell Lightbox this summer seemed to prove the long-held suspicion that if you want to attend a fun party in Toronto, go to one thrown by Italians. It all started, appropriately enough, with a wild party. Perhaps “wild” is an overstatement. After all, we are talking about a party…

From the evening of Friday, June 3 to the afternoon of Sunday, July 24, 2011, the audiences of Los Angeles were treated to the extended run of Dina Morrone’s engaging and thought-provoking new play, Moose on the Loose. I had the very distinct pleasure of attending the opening night and its final performance, whereupon I realized the magic that this theatrical…

In The Honeymoon Wilderness (Mansfield, 2002), Pier Giorgio Di Cicco writes the kind of poetry that traces the cartography of the ordinary acts of living and how they make contact with our existential questions and the soul's longings. Di Cicco's voice attains a dazzling level of lyrical and spiritual power in this book of new poems, since he broke his publishing silence…

On June 10, 1940, and in the months following, while Canada was at war against Italy, hundreds of Italian Canadian men across the country were arrested by virtue of the War Measures Act. Terrified men, some as young as eighteen and others in their seventies, were whisked away to internment camps in the Canadian bush to serve a sentence as…