First, a very brief Review on Amazon.com:
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"More Italian Hours"  5 Star- Subtle grace, August 26, 2001 
Reviewer: Frank Gado from Enfield, NH USA 

Helen Barolini warrants more attention. Her essays are wonderful excursion, 
and her best novel, Umbertina, offers the most compelling portrayal of an 
Italian immigrant yet produced by an American writer. Now we have a 
collection of short stories, very much in the vein of Henry James (hence the 
appropriate, if unexciting, title). Enjoy a respite from writers striving to 
win attention by flogging the latest -ism. Barolini's writing has a subtle 
grace that rewards the act of reading. Enter these well-crafted precincts of 
fiction for the pleasure of following the sine of language in the service of 
depicting various lives. 
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RAA Preface: The following affirms what many have been saying for a long time: 
The Media (Hollywood, Newspapers/Magazines, Book Publishers) have so 
"TYPE CAST" Italian Americans as Mafia, that it is immensely difficult to have 
them see/accept us in ANY other role. See reference to "blood and guts" below.
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Editors Note:
I am delighted to present the first book review to appear on H-ITAM since
Dom passed the virtual wand to me.  I am delighted because it is the first of what 
I know will be many book reviews; 
I am delighted because it is a tribute to the work of Helen Barolini, one of 
the greatest living American authors (who also happens to be Italian American 
writing about the real Italian/American experience); 
I am delighted because the review addresses the difficulties Italian Americans 
face in attempting to publish anything other than mob related fare; 
I am delighted because the review pays a tribute to the endeavors of VIA Folios 
and Bordighera Press to correct this appalling situation; 
I am delighted because Fred Misurella is such a wonderful writer that he makes 
us want to drop everything and order the book NOW. 
Finally, I am delighted because Fred has set a standard of which we can
all be proud and towards which we can all strive joyously.

Ben Lawton
H-ITAM Editor
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"MORE ITALIAN HOURS, ANDC OTHER STORIES
VIA Folios 28. 175 pages. $16.00.
(Bordighera Press, Boca Raton, FL)

By Helen Barolini

   A few years ago, a friend of mine submitted a novel about working class
Italian-Americans to a major New York publisher and found to his amazement
an Italian-American editor who loved it and told him in person that her
company would publish it. "A contract," she told him later on the phone,
"will be in the mail in a couple of weeks."
   He waited a couple of months with no contract arriving and then called
the editor. Sobbing as they talked, she told him that no contract would
arrive, that the firm's editor-in-chief had turned down his manuscript
because, given the milieu and background of its characters, he said, the
novel did not have "enough blood and guts in it." After no other house
accepted the manuscript, my friend broke the novel into stories and
published them in a variety of literary magazines.
   I tell this story because it relates to a major problem facing
Italian-American writers. Editors, influenced by Hollywood, the popular
media, or their own bias, expect goons in action, preferably violent action,
in Italian-American stories, and the writer with a thoughtful, literary turn
of mind is unlikely to find a sympathetic audience among them. Early
modernist writers, from Henry James and E.M. Forster all the way through
Arthur Miller, portray Italians and (in Miller's case) Italian-Americans as
brutally violent, primitive, and, if educated, as in James, devious beneath
a smooth exterior. For these writers Italians and Italian-Americans
represent animal vitality, but they are clearly shown as brutal, morally
stunted, dangerous or pathetic remnants of a fallen civilization. In the
end, Edward Gibbon's influential Decline and Fall, which reveals great love
for empire but absolute disdain for a multi-cultured Italy, may be a more
fundamental part of American bias toward Italians and Italian-Americans than
"Scarface," Mario Puzo, or "The Sopranos."
   That bias persists, despite our Italian-American cultural and
intellectual tradition's foundation on the music and philosophy of Dante,
the stateliness of Virgil, the experimentation of Pirandello, and the
metaphysical complexity of Petrarch and the Troubadours. Thoughtful and
realistic, Italian literary traditions have emphasized the decisive,
analytic role that language plays in shaping human life and the world we
live in. From Boccaccio and Machiavelli to Italo Calvino and Primo Levi,
Italian literature's strength derives from poignancy and intellectual
analysis, as well as humor, not from violence or "blood and guts," as the
New York editor put it.
   In More Italian Hours and Other Stories Helen Barolini has gathered
together fifteen elegant stories about Italians and Italian-Americans
shakily balancing on the delicate wire connecting their two worlds. Without
sweat, tee-shirts, or the gunshots my friend's editor hankered for, Barolini
portrays a class of professional Italian-Americans who make a living with
their minds rather than their backs. They can afford to visit Italy
frequently, even live there as expatriots, and despite the sophistication of
their experience, language, and reading, still feel off-balance and ill at
ease.
   In "Shores of Light," the central story in the book, Matilde, an academic
in Venice to present a paper on Henry James strolls along the streets and
canals of the city ruminating on her mother, a failed scholar, her Italian
father,who was a Venetian poet, her husband, Manning, child of wealthy New
Englanders, and, of course, Henry James. Throughout the walk, she evaluates
her life and self, probing character, wondering about her multi-cultured
background and her own place in it, "jettisoned," as Barolini puts it,
"between Italy and America." Dining with her father's two elderly sisters,
Matilde suddenly feels out of her depth, wondering about the proper way to
use the napkins at the table and suffering the tensions of her inner
character, so different from her self-confidence when she sees a conference
poster with her name featured on it. Made up of her Italian-American mother,
her gentle Venetian father, her stuffy Yankee husband, and her burgeoning
academic career, she puzzles through her future and her past, finding a
rational, yet hazy self-definition. One doesn't give up, she tells herself.
As a teacher, writer, daughter, and wife she moves on through the "struggle
in the dark" that life represents, hoping through mind and thought to find
Lucretius's promised "shores of light."
   In the collection's title story, "More Italian Hours", a younger, less
successful Italian-American professional woman named Connie searches for
illumination also, living in Rome and hoping to become a journalist, all the
while earning a living as a teacher of English. During a trip to Sicily with
her Italian boyfriend, Giorgio, to interview a famous poet who also happens
to be a Sicilian count she concludes that any glimpse of light for her will
be at best temporary. The count, exhausted by age and simply waiting for
death, convinces her that luminous visions are temporary at best, that her
love, at least with Giorgio, will not last, and that life in Italy has very
little future. Yet she likes being an American in Italy: "It made her in
turn tender towards her childhood in Chicago," Barolini writes, "where she
had only been a wop."
   Connie, whose grandparents sailed from Palermo to the new world, feels
the pull of their emigration from Sicily as she talks to the old count, and
by the end of the story she perceives his poems as "polished fragments of a
world caught on the brink of extinction." Later, as she and Giorgio journey
back to Rome, Connie recognizes her commitment to the present (America) and
thinks of herself as one with her grandparents rather than the poet. She
thinks of herself, Barolini says, as a "Sicilian who got away," a feeling
that represents many of the characters in this book.
   Other moments of insight fill these fifteen stories, most forming in an
epiphany of thought when past and present, Italian and American life, as
well as memory and dream, after struggling to annihilate each other,
suddenly coalesce into a bittersweet understanding for the central
character. Without much physical action, these characters (usually women)
illustrate Henry James's famous advice to a writer in "The Art of Fiction":
"Try to be one of the people upon whom nothing is lost." In stories like
"Diving into Eternity," "Gianni on the Rocks," "Michaelmas Daisies," and
"Bobbing," Barolini's wit and clear-eyed, subtle writing encourage the
reader, especially the Italian-American reader, to see life completely, with
the past luminous in the present, memory lighting up the dream, and the
brightness of all four together revealing a clear path through the uncharted
dark. As Fran, an author who is the central character in "Diving into
Eternity" says, "sometimes readers wrote to her and said that she had
written things they thought only they had felt but hadn't known how to put
into words."
   Such is the communication a reader finds in More Italian Hours. It is a
wonderful book, philosophic, filled with intelligent, independent Italian
and Italian-American men and women who grasp life with their minds as well
as their hands. They may stagger beneath its weight, but these characters
also stumble forward out of sheer energy and love for what they see, feel,
and hear around them. We owe Bordighera thanks for putting these stories
before us in such a beautiful trade paperback edition. With Barolini's
Chiaroscuro and More Italian Hours, Daniela Gioseffi's two collections of
poems, Lewis Turco's essays and poems, and other volumes in the VIA Folio
series, the editors have performed an important service in righting American
publishing's failure to take seriously Italian-American subject matter in
works of literary value. Be "one of the people upon whom nothing is lost,"
the master said. That's advice the New York editor and others like him ought
to heed.