All Fitzcarraldo Editions books are worth reading and Thea Lenarduzzi's Dandelions, in which she pulls together and picks apart her Italian family's history and connections with England is no exception. It's charming and beguiling and ends up a really powerful social and cultural history of the last century or so. Its meandering style takes some getting used to (it took me a while to adjust) and the guiding metaphors of dandelions and mosaics seem a little overdone. As she writes of stories and mosaic: "Break your gaze and it's a blur again". Glad I read it though.

Much more than a simple memoir, this wide-ranging exploration of the author’s family is at once a meditation on home, identity, belonging and migration as well as a social and political history of the times that family lived through. Centred around her beloved grandmother and the tales she had to tell, the author allows herself to wander far and wide – sometimes perhaps meandering too far and wide, as occasionally my attention wandered when the non-linear narrative dwelt too much on people I simply had no connection with. Nevertheless, this is a fine piece of writing, intelligent, perceptive and deeply personal whilst retaining a universality that all readers will relate to.

A really moving and tender memoir of a family's story of immigration, food and home. Stories like these are vital because they challenge our understanding of memory as unfallible, as well as rendering unstable its function as the crux of our personal identities.

This book blends the personal and political in a truly powerful way.

Beginning with the tale of her grandmother collecting dandelions and the importance of dandelions and similar 'weeds' to immigrants (drawing a line between 'unwanted' plants and the immigrant experience of not quite belonging), this tale soon weaves into a much bigger tale about the feeling of being uprooted, about the role of memory in holding on to who you are and where you are from, and about what we inherit from the people around us.

We are almost a fly on the wall as Lenarduzzi interviews her grandmother, and asks her to share stories from her life, often revealing truly profound meditations on life and the human experience.

This book is a treasure, and above all else, is full of heart.

I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wow I don’t think I can overstate how much of an impression Dandelions has had on me: being British Italian myself, I’ve never seen a book devoted to the exploration of such complicated identity(ies) that I find myself torn between on a daily basis. I was moved to tears (a rarity) when Lena articulated her emotions at passport control. Throughout I cherished the tenderness in Lena’s interactions with her Nonna and, it has taken me some time to digest as this made me deeply miss my own Nonna.

With respect to linguistic idiosyncrasies, I loved the influence of Natalia Ginzburg which is felt throughout in Lenarduzzi’s work as she introduces phrases at first with translation and then when they come up again the reader is already so familiar with them that they have entered into the reader’s lexicon and rightly do not need for translations to be reiterated. Initially, it was slightly irritating for me as an Italian speaker to have to skip over the English translation but I am thrilled that Lena didn’t opt to merely render her conversations with her Nonna into English and made this accessible for non-Italian speakers and I am even more thrilled to see furlan/friulano included in an English-language publication. Moreover, overall I think this approach nicely echoed Natalia Ginzburg’s approach to introducing her own family’s sayings in Lessico Famigliare.

I am profoundly grateful to Fitzcarraldo Editions and Net Galley for this ARC and above all to Lena!

Writer and editor Thea Lenarduzzi’s first full-length work, published as a result of winning the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. It’s a moving, almost investigative, narrative of her family’s history, represented through a series of intertwining pieces that fall somewhere between memoir and essay. Lenarduzzi, partly inspired by Natalia Ginzburg’s idiosyncratic account of growing up in pre-WW2 Italy, sat down with her Italian grandmother (Nonna) to hear her stories of their family’s past. Lenarduzzi’s work also owes a debt to the practice of oral history, its methods of unearthing and bearing witness to the lives of ordinary people, the hidden or forgotten. Lenarduzzi, like many of her relatives before her, has lived suspended between countries: an Italian father and an English mother; time spent in Italy, then in England; study in France. Someone who’s scrabbled to patch together some clear sense of who she is out of her fragmented past. Her Nonna’s (Dirce) history is filled with similar ruptures. Born in 1926 in Maniago Libero, in a working-class community to the north of Venice, Dirce’s father’s dual identity led her briefly to Sheffield in the 1930s, as he searched for work to support his family; then back to Italy; and later as a married woman to Manchester and finally back again.

Lenarduzzi opens with a striking image of her grandmother, transplanted to post-war England, gathering dandelions on a Manchester wasteland, destined to accompany a Sunday meal. Spinning out from this image, and her grandmother’s recollections, Lenarduzzi constructs an intricate tale of identity, displacement and loss. One that also reveals aspects of the cultural and social history of Italy over the course of the twentieth century. Her narrative is garnished with snippets of folklore, the rich customs and the foods that form part of her family’s foundations: from the history and symbolism of the dandelion onwards. She draws parallels too between this tenacious, survivor of a plant, its seeds drifting on the wind, and the precariousness of life as a migrant striving to carve out an existence far from their homeland. Lenarduzzi, not unexpectedly, probes concepts of memory and identity, the role of stories and storytelling in shaping individuals and tying families together – or driving them apart. Her prose is elegant and precise, her imagery’s often powerful, haunting even, and her bond with her grandmother is movingly rendered. Perhaps inevitably there were sections that really worked for me and others that didn’t, some were a little too meandering and dry for my taste, others featuring Lenarduzzi’s more intimate thoughts of lost family members were just too personal to relate to as a reader who is, after all, an uninvolved bystander.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions for an ARC

Rating: 3/3.5

“Dandelions” – Thea Lenarduzzi

Published on 7th September by @fitzcarraldoeditions, thanks to them and to @netgalley for an ARC in return for an honest review!

“Dandelions”, or at least the opening part of it, was the winner of the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay competition. Covering a huge swathe of topics from botany and Italian history to family stories, Lenarduzzi paints a kaleidoscopic family memoir, one spanning four generations and two countries.

At the heart of the piece is Nonna Dirce, Lenarduzzi’s paternal grandmother and the person who provides an anchor for the book. The author recorded several hours of interviews with her, picking her memories to meld with world events and other sources to explore themes such as identity, memory, belonging and family.

From what I can see online, the people who received this book early have enjoyed it more than I did, which makes me think a lot of it went over my head. I enjoyed a lot of this book, with its mix of factoids and musings about immigrant experience, and I loved the use of dandelions as a metaphor in this area, one that gets reused and recycled to great effect.

Other parts dragged and didn’t really go anywhere for me, and the structure got me lost as to the exact timeline of the family history – the jumps between England and Italy are frequent and hard to keep in my mind. This is a fairly consistent problem I have as a reader, however, so bear in mind that it’s more a fault in myself than the book itself, but the point remains.

That said, there are enough passages here to entice a lot of readers, from Mussolini’s love of aviation (linked to Nonna Dirce’s love of romance novels and the ideals of fascism), the failed marriage of Garibaldi, right through to playing cards as a symbol for the regional differences that persist in Italy to this day. I learned a lot, but I can’t say that the family memoir aspect affected me the way it seemingly has others.

Serendipitously, I read Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon just a couple of weeks ago and so was already thinking about the role of language as a family and community bond, as well as an aide memoire before Lenarduzzi cited that book herself. But this abstraction is only one of the elements that is woven together to make up this book.

In what has become a prominent go-to mode of postmodernism, this tangles up in itinerant fashion linguistics with family history, cultural differences with political history, meditations on immigration and what it means to be in-between two cultures on both a micro- and macro level. The eponymous dandelions serve as a figure for both the gaps between Italian and English culture - but also encompass the image of all those spores that are blown away and apart, a kind of diaspora with a lost 'home' but also the potential to create further little homes with a common root.

The writing is fluent, and some of this is very moving. A wonderful cross between memoir, history and essay.

Italian immigrants come to London in the late 1800s and have a son, who eventually goes back to Italy and marries and has a daughter, who in turn moves to Manchester and has a son, who will later move back to Italy and have a daughter (our author) who is currently living in England. In this book dandelions serve as a metaphor for immigrants, Thea writes, “all immigrants have narratives in which the mundane is ripe with symbolism.”

Some parts of the book were unexpectedly moving, the period leading up to 1971 in particular which is, ‘best told through snatched scenes, brief flashes of something solid in a fog.’ As I read, I suddenly thought wow, perhaps that’s all life really is, a series of snatched scenes; like when me and my brother saw a rat run up a ladies leg up the high street, the infamous missing creme egg, the feeling of being warm and cosy in my bed as my dad sat on the floor reading me Harry Potter. How the only thing my own future grandchildren will know of my parents, my grandparents are the things I will tell them, a collection of ‘snatched scenes’, remembered and repeated and re repeated until they become our own mythology. What will I say when my grandchildren ask me what Covid was like or ask me about Boris Johnson? Will age have softened me, blurred my memories, will I respond, “Oh Boris Johnson he wasn’t that bad, yes we were cold that winter but everyone was back then, it wasn’t unusual.”

http://www.artsbooksplaces.com/dandelions/

Thank you, Net Galley and Fitzcarraldo Editions for the arc.

“Nonna’s stories had been a comforting background noise, like water steadily following its course outside the house in which I live.”

Oh wow, this book feels like a warm embrace from my granny. The author’s words were so comforting to the point that they felt like they’re satisfying my overthinking brain as I question what home truly means.

What I also like about the construction of the chapters here is that they’re like a collection of snippets of the author’s family tree throughout the decades. And I love that it felt like I was in a journey with the author because you will know that as you read this you and her are both audience members of their story.

This is a memoir spanning four generations across Italy & England, largely inspired by conversations between the author & her grandmother. It feels like grief runs through the veins of this book albeit in a very beautiful way.

There was a lot of Italian history over the past 100 or so years included which I found interesting, as well as the cultural differences between Italy and the UK. One being the very title of this book - dandelions are commonly used in cooking in the region the author is from whereas in the UK her grandmother received funny looks for picking them.

A gorgeous on meditation belonging and identity.

Thanks to NetGalley and Fitzcarraldo for the opportunity to review this book!

Framed around conversations she has with her aging Italian grandmother about her personal history, Dandelions is an engaging examination of family, home, migration, language and identity across the UK and Italy. I found Thea Lenarduzzi's non-fiction debut to be as compelling as any novel, one of those almost sui generis offerings that Fitzacarralo seems to do so well. Highly recommended!

In 2020, Thea Lenarduzzi won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize with the initial chapter of what would become her hauntingly beautiful debut – Dandelions. Lenarduzzi was born and raised in Northern Italy, to an Italian father and an English mother. She now lives in the UK, in an uncanny reiteration – whether through destiny or choice – of the history of their forebears. Her Italian-born grandparents and great-grandparents had settled for long spells in England first between the wars, then in the 1950s. Dandelions is their story, told through the perspective of Lenarduzzi’s paternal grandmother, Nonna Dirce. Hours of recorded interviews with the redoubtable matriarch are combined with the author’s own memories and distilled into a family history which, through a tale of loves gained and lost, joys and sorrows, deaths and new beginnings, explores the themes of identity and belonging over several generations.

This memoir is as much the author’s own story as that of Nonna Dirce and her ancestors, a story lived in (and in between) two very different countries both of which were, in their own way, “home”. The dandelions of the title are a potent and multi-faceted symbol. They represent Nonna Dirce, who gathers them to prepare them as condiment to her dishes. Their seeds, spreading far and wide on the breath of the wind, evoke the diaspora of whole communities who leave their country to settle down elsewhere. They also remind us, however, of cultural differences – they are ubiquitous in both Italy and the UK, but in one country they are considered edible, in the other, not, thus highlighting the challenges of the immigrant experience:

"All immigrants have narratives in which the mundane is ripe with symbolism, centred on moments in which the difference between them and us, the natives and the newcomers, are somehow distilled. We recycle abstruse parables, pass them down the generations, and find in them nourishment, confirmation of something never fully articulated... We Italians know how good gently wilted tarassaco tastes, once tossed with salt, perhaps a splash of vinegar or squeeze of lemon, and the essential olive oil, which, in England, you had to buy from the pharmacy back then (t’immagini? Can you imagine?). The British, on the other hand, do not. Dandelion and burdock is one thing, they’d say, picking weeds from a wasteland, something else entirely".

Lenarduzzi poignantly expresses the often conflicting emotions of immigrants and persons with dual citizenship, who may call two countries their home and yet feel strangely out of place in either, a sense of “in-betweenness”. There’s a certain serendipity in the fact that I read this memoir soon after Bejn Bejnejn by Palestinian-Maltese author Walhid Nabhan, a short story collection which explores the same theme of dual citizenship and (non-)belonging. At one point, Lenarduzzi conveys the strange but exquisite irony of her living for a time in France, physically half way between the two places she calls home.

"By revising my attachments to England and Italy, I was performing a dual belonging which I did not confidently feel. There had always been a subtext of insufficiency, even fraudulence, about this hypthenated identity I had inherited – that I was not English enough to call myself English but not Italian enough to call myself Italian – and, in Paris, this intensified. To reach firmer ground, I pushed back against this other culture that now surrounded me.... The irony is that the betwixt and betweenness of being in a country that sat almost exactly halfway between these two places I call home was a fairly accurate reflection of the stuff in me."

Dandelions would have worked well enough as a lyrical family memoir, suffused with nostalgia and melancholy. But Lenarduzzi goes further. Details from her family’s past trigger intriguing sociological and historical ruminations: on the rise and fall of Fascism (and nagging, guilty doubts as the family’s wartime allegiances); Mussolini’s obsession with aviators; the racy romances or romanzi rosa of Amalia Negretti Odescalchi detta “Liala”; dark Friulian folklore courtesy of the writings Carlo Ginzburg; Garibaldi and the Risorgimento; the anni di piombo (literally the “years of lead”, marked by terroristic attacks by extremist groups); the differences between the packs of playing cards used in different regions of Italy, testament to the diverse historical and cultural influences which formed this relatively modern state. Thus, one family’s memory trove becomes a microcosm reflecting the heritage of a whole country.

This book held a particular resonance for me since I come from Malta, which is so close to Italy and which is marked, thanks to own chequered history, by the same Mediterranean/British dichotomy experienced “in the flesh” by Lenarduzzi’s family. But really it is a truly special debut which I would recommend to any reader. It drew me in from its very first page, where Maniago, the small Italian town where Nonna Dirce was born, is described as a place “where the plains pucker along the seam of the north-eastern Alps”. It is an arresting metaphor and, we soon learn, a particularly appropriate one too since Dirce is a fine seamstress. Small gems such as these pepper the text, making this a wonderful reading experience, and likely one of the best books I’ll read this year.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2022/08/dandelions-by-thea-lenarduzzi.html

Lenarduzzi presents readers with a fine debut, a memoir that is intelligently written, binding history, sociology and mythology into a flowing and gorgeously written narrative. This is a personal narrative tackling the question of what represents 'home', but also what represents 'remarkable'? In this narrative, Lenarduzzi uses the history given to her by her grandmother, who moved from Italy to the UK, and links it to herself, and (fascinating) information about dandelions. Metaphorically speaking, who knew dandelions were edible, for a start? And the link to the way in which dandelions seed themselves so easily is well used. Unsurprisingly, Lenarduzzi won the prestigious 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions / Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize for her proposal for this book, and it seriously does not disappoint. A beautiful piece of work. Highly recommended.

My grateful thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions and to Netgalley for the ARC.