The Vietri Project
A Novel
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3.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A Lithub, Good Reads, Bustle, and The Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2021
"The Vietri Project is a riveting, shifting quest, an evocative trip to Rome, and a beautiful portrayal of the ways you need to return to the past in order to move forward. A great delight from start to finish.”--Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers and Lovers
A search for a mysterious customer in Rome leads a young bookseller to confront the complicated history of her family, and that of Italy itself, in this achingly intimate debut with echoes of Lily King and Elif Batuman.
Working at a bookstore in Berkeley in the years after college, Gabriele becomes intrigued by the orders of signor Vietri, a customer from Rome whose numerous purchases grow increasingly mystical and esoteric. Restless and uncertain of her future, Gabriele quits her job and, landing in Rome, decides to look up Vietri. Unable to locate him, she begins a quest to unearth the well-concealed facts of his life.
Following a trail of obituaries and military records, a memoir of life in a village forgotten by modernity, and the court records of a communist murder trial, Gabriele meets an eclectic assortment of the city’s inhabitants, from the widow of an Italian prisoner of war to members of a generation set adrift by the financial crisis. Each encounter draws her unexpectedly closer to her own painful past and complicated family history—an Italian mother diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized during her childhood, and an extended family in Rome still recovering from the losses and betrayals in their past. Through these voices and histories, Gabriele will discover what it means to be a person in the world; a member of a family and a citizen of a country—and how reconciling these stories may be the key to understanding her own.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young woman evades her uncertain future by fixating on an elderly man in DeRobertis-Theye's introspective if meandering debut. Two years after graduating from college, Gabriele works in a Berkeley, Calif., bookstore fulfilling the increasingly arcane mail orders of a Roman man named Giordano Vietri. At 25, anxious about marrying her boyfriend and with dwindling hopes for a "real job," she flees to Rome, where she spent summers with her mother's extended family in her early teens, and searches for Vietri. Her inquiries, helped by cousin Andrea and his fellow doctoral student friends, take her through a series of tangents: a painter whose famous memoir recounts time in Vietri's home village; a widow whose husband served with Vietri during WWII; and a journalist who wrote a story about a pottery company named Vietri. As Gabriele mulls over the purpose of her quest, she frets about her mother's schizophrenia diagnosis, which she received around the same age Gabriele is now, shortly before Gabriele was born. Gabriele's gradual drift builds to a tentative conclusion, though the author's tendency to rush past major details blunts the impact. While gracefully written, this circuitous bildungsroman only skims the surface.
