Been Here a Thousand Years

by Mariolina Venezia

Book Overview

In a tiny, ancient Italian hill town, where the land gives littleand money and food are scarce, Don Francesco Falcone is a man to be reckoned with: rich, powerful, restless, intransigent. When he meets another force of nature, Concetta, a penniless but fiercely indestructible farmworker, the stage is set for the creation of an exceptional family: generations of strong, complicated boys and, especially, girls. The battles between them are many as they...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374208913
• ISBN13: 9780374208912
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 263 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Birth. Life. Death. Infinity.

Stark and powerful, this novel addresses the fortunes and failures visited to all families; herein seen through the history and generations of the family of Don Francesco Falcone. There are traits and entanglements, lusts and liaisons, and the external historical influences that challenge survival. Seemingly innocuous decisions are made that alter the family for future generations. Thought provoking and easily readable, this novel/family history reminds us all "we've been here a thousand years."

Striking and Unique

This is a novel of both people--five generations of a family--and a place--Italy, beginning in 1861--, but weight that mostly towards the people. Though the setting is fixed, the real focus is on the individuals, on the flux of personalities within a family and political divisions (the family progresses through communism, fascism, socialism...). The smallest decisions and fixations can entirely shift self-definition and the lifetime alliances and rivalries that spring up in a single household are quickly experienced; there are sudden, dramatic exits, revelations, pariahs, secrets, affairs... Like other big-family novels (Midnight's Children, 100 Years of Solitude) it sometimes transcends the real, but I would hesitate to say magically. It's more a work of believable slight-surrealism, where the atmosphere shifts towards a place familiar but pleasantly foreign: "When Gioia was a little older, her grandmother Lucrezia would bring her swallows from the fields, their wings and beaks snipped. She would tie them to the balcony rail so that Gioia could watch them flitter around clumsily, trying helplessly to fly. In August Lucrezia bought cicadas, which she placed under an overturned glass. They would sing until they ran out of air and died of asphyxiation. And she brought lightning bugs which filled the darkness above the chest of drawers in her room with a delicate, greenish light." It is filled with striking and unique images--it begins with a scene of hundreds of tons of olive oil rolling down the hill from the village center, past a young boy walking a rat on a leash, for example--and a roaring-river momentum of births, loves, and deaths, surprisingly packaged into a non-epic 256 pages. Though this is Mariolina Venezia's first novel, it was a bestseller and prizewinner in Italy, and this translation is strong.