The Swallows of Lunetto

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My life was moving on. I began a new relationship, moved, cut down on drinking (and then, later, stopped altogether). I gave myself the time and space to change. And all the while, those roots I’d put down into the darkness were doing their work. He had been broken so many times, first by war and then by the wars within him, but he had prevailed. That’s all there is, to prevail.

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. 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. When the man flees, she follows him. They make a simple life together. They make a baby together. But the man cannot escape his fate. 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. 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.The Italian text that the author inserts is *far* too much for an English language novel. Rarely is there an intuitive link to the text for someone who doesn’t know Italian. It’s only by coincidence that I have a bunch of Duolingo under my belt, but if I hadn’t, then something as simple as ‘Gli uomini’ doesn’t add depth to the book, it distracts from it. 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. And yet we never have nothing. We always have what we have tried to do. Always. Somewhere in us, our lives and our works ripen in secret. And what kind of story was it? On its surface, it had absolutely nothing to do with the plots of those two abandoned manuscripts, but I sensed, and later knew for certain, that what I was doing was alchemizing the abandoned material into the form, the story, the voice it had meant to be all along. 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.

Fasano's first novel, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, was published in 2020 to critical acclaim. [10] [11] [12] [13] His second novel, The Swallows of Lunetto, became a viral social media sensation during his 2023 European book tour, covered by the BBC, the Evening Standard, The Independent, and other media. [14] [15] [16] 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.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 trauma of war is intergenerational. The characters know that to be alive is to be broken, that there is no safety in the world. That life means living the questions, the questions that arise from our own selves. 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.

Harvard Book Store welcomes JOSEPH FASANO, award-winning author, songwriter, and professor atColumbia University and Manhattanville College, for a discussion of his new novel The Swallows of Lunetto. Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Joseph Fasano writes about The Swallows of Lunetto from Maudlin House. http://ciderpressreview.com/contributors/joseph-fasano-ba-2011/ Cider Press Review 2011 Book Award Announcement 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?Magical moment' for author as he sat next to stranger on plane reading his book". 23 February 2023.