Mother Tongue: An American Life in Italy

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

Book Overview

In the 1980s, the American writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved with her Italian husband and her daughter to Parma, a small city in northern Italy that has existed since Roman times. Her search for a place for herself in a society that often seems closed to outsiders led Wilde-Menozzi to explore the pull between individualism and community, the role of women in both Parma's culture and her own Midwestern upbringing, and the powers and limits of language...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865476705
• ISBN13: 9780865476707
• Release Date: October 2003
• Publisher: North Point Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A resonant and insightful work not to be missed

It's difficult to describe this book as simply a memoir when the writing is at times as eloquent as poetry and the themes range from Italian history and politics to individualism and family all the way down to violets outside the window and bread on the table. Above all is the issue of identity- of speaking with an American voice in another landscape- and the struggle that arises when someone gifted, youthful and inquisitive lands in an inward-looking place stiffly rooted in tradition and sameness. Among the rules and formalities of Italian life, Wilde-Menozzi exhibits a fierce determination to explore and understand both the limits and depths of her new country while trying to maintain the largely American ideals of optimism, free will and self-actualization. What I appreciate about this book is the sincerity and scope of her search for a sense of belonging and connection. With a tone that is rebellious at times, she looks to politics, women in history, Italian behavior, food and culture for answers and comfort and ultimately finds solace in her own powers of observation, analysis and invention. The result is an insightful and daring book rich with beautifully observed elements of modern Italy which also manages to be a deeply moving and personal work.

More than memoir

This book examines related and ramifying themes: a complex accomodation to the writer's life abroad in her second marriage to a gifted Italian scientist, the life of her late Italian mother-in-law, the rewards and challenges of raising an American-born daughter in Italy, and the history of Parma as an expatriate discovers it. through an idiosyncratic and utterly charming progression of chapters. The gifted poet and essayist behind these reflections emerges in a self-portrait unobtrusively yet indelibly. Life and death challenge her, an adopted country both welcomes and resists her: a sensibility of great depth and nuance undergoes reshaping in the event. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi's subsequent book of lyrics, BEES AND OTHER POEMS (2001), carries this sensibility into free verse of distinction and agile grace. The prose here, like the poems printed subsequently, manifest an integral stylist, who inquires with sharp eye and open heart, and makes the connections that want to be made, both the elusive and the penetrating ones. A distinguished and inventive book.John Peck

I touched part of my own life in Mother Tongue.

I am an Italian who has worked in Italy strengthening cultural links between my country and America. For many years, I have lived experiencing differences and similarities between the peoples of these two countries! Imagine my surprise and delight when I found Mother Tongue, An American Life in Italy, which translates for me more deeply than anything I have read the lyrical, historical, and cultures--especially these two cultures. Yes, I said, page after page. Yes, I said, recognizing the laughter and pain of personal and social change, the mystery of nationality, the dephts of relationships and family ties. I touched part of my own life in Mother Tongue.

a spiritual journey filled with gems

Mother Tongue is a book to savor. Those who want a rapid read or a linear account will be frustrated. The book's strength is in its "free association" style and its poetic richness.When asked to say what the book is about, readers'answers vary. "It is a book about the strength of women." "...about being a foreigner." "...about Parma, Italy." "about Family." "...about the differences in two cultures." "...about the importance of place."While this reader would agree with all of the above, it is more significantly a sharing of the spiritual journey that grows from enormous loss. In that sense it is the hero's journey. I am reminded of Dante's, "Midway along the journey of life I woke to find myself in some dark woods... How hard it is to tell what it was like, this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn... But if I would show the good that came of it/ I must talk about things other than the good."Wallis Wilde Menozzi's journey into a foreign land, with all of the "letting go" that is required by that literal leap, has at its heart the journey away from home that each of us makes in order to find the home within. Oneness and Separateness (the repeating of that first life journey where we must struggle with "Mine" and "Yours", "I" and "You") are achingly desribed, poetically expressed, and carefully crafted. Menozzi writes with a primal potent power.Menozzi draws upon rememberings, reflections, associations, images, dreams, architectural spaces, events, pets and neighbors, family life and historic figures who become mentors. Everything at hand becomes currency for the purchase of personhood.The stories of her historic mentors are particularly rich. For example she says to Ovid, "Admit it, Ovid, you were a complainer... To keep yourself alive you accepted the task of exploring myths, all you remembered about them... You captured the eternal inevitability of breakup and caprice and unstoppable tides... How Ovid, did you transmit so stunningly the unalterable power of a life's connection with events driven by the gods, if not because you entered an exploration of your own situation? You wrote, Ovid, starting from your feet's memory of ground... you took the paradox over and over and over: no one escapes change."It takes alot of courage to enter the dark woods and encounter monsters. This book is full of all the treasures that such a journey provides, ant the reader is the fortunate recipient of precious gems. Menozzi says it well when she says, "For me, the plummet into the unspoken had been something like prayer, private, internal, but infinite like sky. It was universal."It is that universality that resonates in the reader's soul, and issues in gratitude. This is a book to be turned to over and over. It's beauty lies in the fact that it can be opened anywhere and the eye will fall upon what Menozzi describes in a different context, as, "language that feeds and changes you, if you fall towa

A sensitive portrayal of Italian and American culture

Mother Tongue is an intimate and down-to-earth exploration of daily life as it emerges from Anglo-Saxon Protestant and Italian Catholic traditions. It is composed in twenty-nine brief sections. Readers will find little gems on almost every page which illuminate major questions of our time. I keep this book close at hand. It opens doors to cultural understanding. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi is an American writer who takes the reader into a culture in which the group and the community define daily life. American readers will find much here to yearn for, and much that they will not bear. So this book does not offer us any false and easy answers to our modern search from both community and individualism. Rather, we are engaged by one perceptive thought after another on the meaning of human relationships. "I didn't come in as an anthropologist, observing difference," she writes. "I came in as a human being looking for an open door." She has entered a small Catholic church in Parma, Italy, where she now lives with her Italian husband and her daughter. She wishes to be alone, to regain if only for a moment a sense of her own space in a society that gives her very little to herself. In Parma there is not much of a snese of the self, for the individual, at least not as Americans tend to understand individualism. It is a society that envelopes her. "Everyday as I write in my study at home, all that goes on crosses into my work. Space is not an idea. I have no maid. My child comes home and expects a hot lunch. My husband too, helpful and brilliant, still has no love of space; in fact, he wants to fill it in. The noise or upset about things not found or done--expectations seen from an oddly absolute perspective of what should happen in a home--are daily fireworks.'She is not always alone in the small church. "Last week an old white-haired man had his head on a pew and was down on his knees. It is moving to come upon someone in a cramped space, like going around a curve and meeting someone else's need head on. Community is a delicate definition that I can't articulate but feel."This is precisely what the author accomplishes. She feels daily life in Italy. She senses, smells, touches, hears, sees, and runs up against it. She is alive in it. Through her feelings she articulates community in Parma. Trying to locate herself, she searches for a way to express herself, always fearful that she is on the verge of being regarded as a GASATA, a windbag, a person who talks too much about herself, from herself. We learn how words and language are different in different places. We navigate between the public and the private. The author becomes particularly sensitive to the central place of women in the Italian past and present, and she wonders what American feminists would make of these women. From Parma, Wilde-Menozzi reflects on her life in America and on her youth in Wisconsin. America is the mental an