Dandelions
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Where, or what, is home? What has it meant, historically and personally, to be 'Italian' or 'English', or both in a culture that prefers us to choose? What does it mean to have roots? Or to have left a piece of oneself somewhere long since abandoned?
In Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi pieces together her family history through four generations' worth of migration between Italy and England, and the stories scattered like seeds along the way. At the heart of this book is her grandmother Dirce, a former seamstress and a repository of tales that are by turns unpredictable, unreliable, significant. Through the journeys of Dirce and her relatives, from the Friuli to Sheffield and Manchester and back again, a different kind of history emerges.
A family memoir rich in folk legends, food, art, politics and literature, Dandelions heralds the arrival of an exceptional writer: bold, joyful and wise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lenarduzzi's touching debut, winner of the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, serves up lyrical meditations on food, family, and belonging. She uses the dandelion's easily spread seeds as a metaphor through which to explore her family's migration, focusing on the story of her grandmother Dirce, who at age 24 moved to Manchester, England, from Maniago, Italy, in 1950 amid the country's postwar economic downturn. Weaving together anecdotes from her family's history, she recounts her family's "parable" about Dirce picking dandelion leaves in Manchester to the bewilderment of onlookers, who were unaware that in Italy the leaves were commonly eaten "tossed with salt, perhaps a splash of vinegar." Historical detours enrich the symbolism, as when the author notes that European settlers may have brought dandelions to the Americas in the 1600s because the weed's hardiness ensured it would take root and provide a "steady supply of leaves for salads and stews." Lenarduzzi's admiration for her grandmother's resourcefulness and resilience provides an affecting emotional backbone, and the elegant prose delights ("Tens of moony dandelions were meeting their maker, casting their ghost-seeds to the breeze," she writes about a groundskeeper with a weed trimmer). The result is a ruminative take on what it means to put down roots.
