There are no wailing victims of patriarchy, no big familial feasts featuring big bowls of pasta. This is why the book is iconic – here is a protagonist who does not conform to ethnic stereotypes of demure oppression or unbridled Italian emoting. Finally, this was the voice of a teenage Australian girl. They sounded like adults ‘trying hard’ to focus on ‘teenage themes.’īut in Looking for Alibrandi, we found a heroine who lived in the suburbs with her single mother and her meddling grandmother, who went to school, obsessed about boys and worked at McDonalds. This sort of thinking was not uncommon because many young adult books of the time dealing with ‘our lives’ never quite got the voice right. We feel we have nothing interesting to say so we resort to trying to sound more ‘sophisticated.’ We do not allow ourselves to sound like teenagers because we feel that teenage experience amounts to not very much at all. Our own thoughts seem pedestrian and suburban, ever revolving around school and home. This is the blessing and curse of reading really good writing: we think that our own voices are inchoate. Additionally, encountering the more confident and refined adult voices of Wharton, Austen, Fitzgerald and Dickens made me realise that writing was hard work, that it wasn’t about putting speech to paper, but visions to paper. Yet that ability often weakens with each school year, diluted by all the essays about more ‘important’ themes: life and death as depicted in Shakespeare, or language analysis of Andrew Bolt columns. You know how to recognise an earnest voice, and sift it from disingenuous voices that might be more technically sophisticated. When you are a young adult, you innately have what Hemingway considers crucial for every serious writer: a built-in bovine-excrement detector, to put it euphemistically. It was the first Australian book I discovered that did not ‘try hard’ to depict youth, class or ethnicity. It is in these ways that Mario is partially culpable for my Columbus-like search for, and non-discovery of, my Sicilian roots that I have cryptically subtitled “You can’t get there from here.” This Columbus-like search and discovery will be presented as an allegorical journey through the mountains of Campania and a real trip to find half of my roots in Sicily.When I first read Melina Marchetta’s much-loved book, Looking for Alibrandi, I was around the same age as Josephine Alibrandi. He also has faithfully shared my observation that being Italian, or even Italian-American, is not merely a matter of having an “appropriate” surname. He has always understood that despite my ignorance of much of that which makes one Italian in his esteemed estimation, he understood that I treasured my marvelously mysterious patrimony that includes, among other poignant cultural insights, the fact that all Italians are anarchists that is, until they are in charge. I was greatly honored by the request, but not at all surprised as he was one on the few who has consistently included me among his “Italian” (as opposed to “Italian American”) friends. ![]() Then I realized that its run-on title was an excuse to honor my older friend, Professor Mario Mignone, on his 70th birthday. When I was invited to present a paper at the Third FIAC Forum on Italian American Criticism, I was caught a bit off guard as I am hardly a “critic” of anything Italian American. While reading them, I felt as though I was sitting around the table, in the basement kitchen of course, where such scholarly friends are allowed to eat and drink but who would never qualify as “company.” As was the face-to-face interactions during the FIAC conference itself, the collection is, taken together but not as whole, a noisy celebration of melodious cacophony. What brings these all too thinly disguised subjects together that cleverly masquerade as merely about Italian America and Italian Americans but which are actually boundless? After careful reading, it appears to me that their strongest commonality is the love of the subject, and in many cases, each other’s work. Most difficult for me was crafting this introduction to what is a most eclectic collection of essays by many of my old, and a few new, friends, and colleagues. Peter Carravetta, D’Amato Chair in Italian and Italian American Status at Stony Brook University did the heavy lifting in organizing the event, and I was honored with the intellectually challenging task of organizing and lightly editing its proceedings. ![]() ![]() The First Annual Forum in Italian American Criticism at which internationally renowned scholars were invited to comment on “The Status of Interpretation in Italian American Studies” was by all accounts a resounding success.
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