DISCOVERIES

TORREGRECA

Life, Death, and Miracles in

a Southern Italian Village

By Ann Cornelisen,

Foreword by Frances Mayes

Steerforth: 295 pp., $16

“I must be honest: They fascinated me,” Ann Cornelisen confesses in this account, first written in 1969, of the Torregresi. Cornelisen first went to Italy in 1954 to study archeology, but her mission in Torregreca was to help the town build and run a nursery for its children. Within the first day, she had met the “pezzi grossi,” the 10% of the population that controlled the other 90%.

Not only had she met them, but she’d heard more than a few of their life stories. “I was that unique person: I could not hurt them, would not judge them, no matter what they told me. I listened through the smoky gloom of three winters.” At first, she was given a room at the local convent, until word got out she was Protestant. “Then the witch hunt was on,” she writes. The nuns lined up across the table “like crows on a fence.”

There is more humor than frustration in subsequent conflicts: negotiations with a new landlord (“It was a play and she was Bernhardt”); being attacked on the street by a mother and daughter dressed in black who claim, falsely, that she has ruined the reputation of their husband/father, the clerk “named Cupid who was not only a devout Fascist but a hater of all foreigners.”

Cornelisen possesses a travel writer’s finest qualities: sturdiness, simple observation, humor and a touch of formality. With these tools and with great warmth, she exposes the fine lines between bureaucracy and community, between formality and friendship.

*

TOURMALINE

By Joanna Scott

Little, Brown: 288 pp., $23.95

Joanna Scott is one of today’s best novelists, and she keeps getting better. As a writer, she plays with traditional narrative without being obscure or outrageous. Her details are placed in their settings like gems in fine jewelry--each has several facets: the beautiful, the dangerous, the ominous and the familiar.

As an author, her plots are driven by important ideas (in “Tourmaline,” is it possible to ever understand our parents’ lives?) and always include a nod of respect to writers and books that have helped inspire the novel--in this case, Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Hawthorne’s character “Miriam” from “The Marble Faun.” But you never feel lost--as in, who is speaking here?--because she defines her characters subtly but unforgettably.

This is the story of a family that flees financial ruin by leaving the United States for the island of Napoleon’s exile: Elba. The father, Murray, is charming and hopeless; the mother, Claire, is constant but passionately in love with her husband; the four brothers are as wild and independent as the children in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves.” They occupy their own world, parallel to the mysterious world of their parents. “They could have their real world. We didn’t want it. A world worth only the value of its resale, a world without magic.”

Murray has an affair and is accused of killing a local girl. The entire island turns against him. Events swirl in the minds and memories of the boys. Claire struggles 43 years later to explain what happened to Ollie, one of her sons. “The soft breeze of the sirocco. The rustle of palm fronds. Piping of a nightingale. Two girls riding bareback on the same brown horse.” If that doesn’t transport you, try this: “The soapstone is soft as goose down. Obsidian tastes of licorice. Wells are lined with melted gold.... Catch a falling star and it will turn to blue tourmaline in your hands. This is true.”

*

THE FLAMBOYANT

By Lori Marie Carlson

HarperCollins: 241 pp., $24.95

Isn’t it odd how words are emptied of meaning by overuse, like an old sponge or a bar of soap? This otherwise delightful novel is plagued by cliches like “passionate kiss,” “meticulous charm,” “sumptuous breakfast,” “sheltered harbor” and he “stepped into her life.” The descriptions bear too much of the novel’s weight. For example: “Basilio Portelli, a conservative Spaniard who had lost his wife to influenza when Ignacio had been an infant.”

Still, it has an interesting plot: the fictional adaptation of the life of Lenora Demarest, the 200th licensed aviatrix in the United States, the first in Puerto Rico, friend of Amelia Earhart’s and a search-and-rescue pilot in World War II. Lenora moves with her father to 1,600 acres in Puerto Rico in 1917 at age 16. On the journey there, she falls in love with pilot George Hanson, who teaches her to fly. There is a fascinating subplot involving jewels Lenora studies as a hobby, but it is only incidentally woven into the story. Strangely, “The Flamboyant” is like an attractive acquaintance you never really get to know--who remains too shy and formal to engage.