The Swallows of Lunetto

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A young woman in the village recalled the boy and connects with the man. She bears her own invisible scars. Her charcoal drawings reflect what she sees, the sea and her town and her sisters, and she studies them hoping to understand what she sees. To understand her life. Besides that, the emphasis on dreams is too much, and the dialogue is not realistic, with many a conversation that (either flew over my head or) was just pointless (not a literal quote:) ‘how do you know?’ ‘Know what? I don’t’ ‘you don’t’ ‘I don’t think you’re supposed to know. You’re supposed to be in it.’ ‘That’s where we are?’ ‘That’s where we are.’ Harvard Book Store welcomes JOSEPH FASANO, award-winning author, songwriter, and professor at Columbia University and Manhattanville College, for a discussion of his new novel The Swallows of Lunetto. A Return to In-Person Events

Fasano seems to be always concerned with the archetypal webs of life and the characters really highlight the importance of that in his body of work - it’s all the more exciting to feel that relationship to the characters. They feel familiar not only because Italian culture feels warm and inviting, but because their stories and wisdom are in us - in some way - too. This is different from his previous novel which was concerned with just a few characters and moments of dialogue; this book moves differently and seems a new achievement for such a poetry-oriented author. He rises to the occasion. Magical moment' for author as he sat next to stranger on plane reading his book". 23 February 2023. And then they blossomed. It’s difficult to explain just how this happened—it’s mysterious even, or perhaps especially, to me—but somehow, after years of laboring on two abandoned manuscripts (still I’m not sure if I abandoned them or they abandoned me), the path was clear before me. I knew what I had to do. Swallows fly in the basilica where Leonardo contemplated death; they fly in and out of Alexandra’s open bedroom windows as she and Leonardo tell their stories. They grow quiet when Alexandra gives birth. They represent hope, new life, renewal.

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How do we live with our choices, grow through them and beyond them? How do we love those who have committed evil? How do we live with the legacy of our ancestor’s acts? About the Book: The Swallows of Lunetto is the powerful story of a young couple's escape from Italian fascism at the end of the Second World War. This research, for me, was and is deeply enjoyable. I wanted to know more, then more, then more. How did Mussolini’s fascists attempt to “educate” the youth in the years prior to the Second World War? With what kind of wood might a young Calabrese artist make her own charcoal with which to draw her images? What would she see in the waves outside her window? At exactly what depth do fishing crews net their catch in a particular season, off a particular port, in the Tyrrhenian Sea?

So I set out to make something else. And I did. There were months of research, plotting, scribbling, pulling the car to the side of the road on the way to the grocery to jot down a sentence, a line, an idea. And yet, once again, something was missing. I had a completed manuscript of what might otherwise have been a third novel, but I knew, in the end, I had nothing. Disappointing. Entire plot seems implausible - over the course of a few hours a woman falls for a man accused of a war-time massacre and leaves her village with him. She knows about the accusation but doesn’t ask for details about what actually happened. And what about the reader? What are the details of the massacre? Why did it happen? We’re forced to infer. something like that is perhaps beyond words. It’s a monstrous thing. And such things are only given a shape later. In the story we tell. The novel considers ageless questions about the source of human evil and how society and individuals respond, about personal guilt and forgiveness. And it is about love that looks deep into another’s soul and, with an almost relentless insistence, points out the path to wholeness. From Joseph Fasano, the acclaimed author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, comes The Swallows of Lunetto, the powerful story of a young couple’s escape from Italian fascism at the end of the Second World War.

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Alexandra Bianchi lives and works in Lunetto, a provincial village in Italy's Calabria region, which finds itself ravaged by war in the summer of 1945. Leonardo Gemetti, a young man from Lunetto, has been missing for nearly eight years, and all his village knows of him is that he has carried out an atrocity against the Italian partisans in Mussolini's fallen Republic of Salò. When Alexandra meets a masked figure in the streets of Lunetto, she cannot imagine what she will learn about history and her place in it.

Author Joseph Fasano recounts sitting next to someone reading his book on a flight". 23 February 2023. Miljure, Ben. "New book offers imagined perspective of Greyhound bus killer". CTVNews Winnipeg . Retrieved 23 March 2015. Face coverings are required of all staff and attendees when inside the store. Masks must snugly cover nose and mouth.Learning about one’s ancestors is a two-edged sword. I have personally discovered horror stories: a family massacred by Native Americans; forced conscription; generations of refugees pushing across continents, those persecuted for their faith traveling across an ocean; a runaway teenager fleeing a dictatorial father. And, most appalling of all, a beloved grandfather who spent four months in prison for attempted “ravishment” of a teenage girl. In 2011, Fasano's first book, Fugue for Other Hands, won the Cider Press Review Book Award. [8] It was nominated for the Kate Tufts Poetry Award and the Poets' Prize, "awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award." His second collection of poems, Inheritance, was released in May 2014. In 2015, Fasano published Vincent, a book-length poem based very loosely on the 2008 killing of Tim McLean by Vince Li on a Greyhound Bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, on the Trans Canada Highway. [9] His fourth collection of poems, The Crossing, was released in 2018. From Joseph Fasano, the acclaimed author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, comes The Swallows of Lunetto, the powerful story of a young couple's escape from Italian fascism at the end of the Second World War. Fasano's poems have appeared in the Yale Review, the Southern Review, FIELD, Tin House, Boston Review, Measure, Passages North, the American Literary Review, and other publications. [7]

I drew, of course, on personal experience, on my time in Italy, on family legends, on reading, on breathing, on life. And all the while, as those gnarled roots were stirring in the darkness, I felt the terror and the splendor of the inevitable blossoming.The Swallows of Lunetto is not a story of war, exactly. It is a story, in part, of war’s aftermath, of what happens when a young man looks up from his youth and realizes, with horror, what he has done. And it is a story of the love and forgiveness that just might be possible not only in spite of but because of the ways in which we have erred. There is so much to plumb in this story of personal and national trauma. Fasano has indicated the novel arose from his struggles with his own heritage. And this adds another layer to the story. This, of course, meant research. Though sometimes in this life of mine I have failed to live voraciously, I have always read voraciously—it is a drug for me, a necessity, a love—and very often I am reading of history. The history of war, in particular, fascinates me, telling as it does the terrible story of what we can do to one another, and thereby teaching us, if we can listen, the ways to avoid catastrophe when next it holds out its hand.