LAMBRUSCO

Set in war-torn Italy in 1943, this novel looks at the peripatetic ramblings of a woman in search of her son.

Lucia Fantini is an opera singer—not a professional but still an expert—who until the war had entertained the clientele at her husband Aldo’s trattoria. Now her husband is dead, the waiters and chefs have dispersed and her son Beppi has gone into hiding after having exploded a German truck. Lucia finds herself in an almost unrecognizable landscape at the nexus of competing historical forces, for Italy has been assailed by the Nazis, the Americans have recently landed and Mussolini’s Blackshirts seemingly lurk around every corner. Still, with the sanguine expectation of ultimate success, Lucia starts off in search of her son. Along the way we learn of her treasured nights as a singer at the restaurant, taking customer and staff requests for arias from Puccini, Rossini, Verdi and Mozart. These lovingly presented flashbacks summon up a lyrical world that has almost been lost except to memory. Lucia links up with Annmarie, a woman who works for American Army Intelligence and whose prior career as a golfer leads Lucia to some surprising discoveries about Annmarie’s strengths. We also meet or hear about some of the eccentric and temperamental workers at Aldo and Lucia’s restaurant, most notably Tito, a butcher who patiently taught his dogs to pee on the boots of the local Fascists, and Ugo, a kind physician and longtime family friend who begins to turn friendship with Lucia toward romance. In one touching scene, Lucia makes a list of things “soft inside, hard outside.” These include “a scallop, a lobster, a crab, a head in a helmet…food in a can,” but ultimately, and tenderly, “a declaration of love in a war.”

Cooney (A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies, 2005, etc.) explores how war causes not just injury to the body but more importantly explains how every participant can be “injured in his nerves, in his self, in his soul.”