A "Vacation" Abroad

Over the past week, I unexpectedly was away from work, out of State, with time on my hands, so headed for Barnes and Noble and other airport book sellers. Two books transported me to South America and Europe, well off the beaten path of our 50 States.

Being a bit of a Luddite despite my stint designing web-based collaborative sites, I only got a DVD player in December. It has been a major distraction to my voracious reading habits, but has engaged me to read books from authors whose works were adapted for movies. I absolutely loved Love in the Time of Cholera and vowed to read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I started with the best, Nobel Prize winning One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a book about place, albeit in Columbia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, the first, actually founds the village of Macondo, and the lives of his family and the growth of the town and its nation is traced across five generations. Unlike Boyle's World's End, each generation cultivates and cherishes its knowledge about Macondo and its legends; however, these people are like their Hudson River counterparts in that they never fully know the intricacies and scandals of their own family history. (Oddly enough, dirt-eating characters appear in both of these novels, suggesting a whole other aspect on place becoming subsumed/consumed.)

Unlike the sterility of Riven Rock, the Buendia's house takes on human characteristics in the story as it changes its personality through good times and bad in the village. And while the story relates the successes and foibles of the male line, it is the women who marry into the family and the unmarried daughters who hold the clan together across time. Garcia Marquez acknowledges that family lore, whether fanciful or not, makes us who we are. After 100 years, you want the story to keep going on.

I do not trust the quality of New York Times bestsellers any more, thinking that these rankings are no better than a talk show host's recommendations. But I kept looking at the intriguing cover of The Monster of Florence and when I picked it up and read that it was a true crime story, I decided to take a chance. There are more than one monster in this book; the biggest being the Italian police and judicial processes. Like Charlatan and The Road to Wellville, place, Florence, here equals opportunity for self advancement -- by bureaucrats who latch on to the investigation to further their own careers and abort those of anyone who differs with them. These men are as intentionally as violent as the never-prosecuted Sardinian who is not charged with the crimes.

Once again I have the feeling that I have never been completely cognizant of what is going on or what information is being fed to me. I cannot recall any of the events from our California selection being taught in high school, and more discomforting, since these Florentine crimes occurred and were prosecuted from the late '60s through the '80s, I wonder why they didn't come to my attention -- perhaps raising young children could explain that.

An interesting tangent on place from Monster is the Internet being a nebulous location, everywhere and nowhere, and in this case, disastrously affecting the outcome of the investigations. The blogging seer who determines guilt and harasses Preston is as corrupt, if not more so, than our Kansas Charlatan or Kellogg of Battle Creek. And her license flies against the lack of freedom of the press in Italy.

I have reserved our Maryland Homicide book from the library to continue this diversion into true crime set in a particular location. (By the way, I was also rereading The Poe Shadow set in Baltimore to set the stage for a diversion into Edwin Drood stories, including the new one by Matthew Pearl.) So far, I have not concluded that place forces immoral and criminal behaviors on residents, but in Monster, Florence and Italian culture most assuredly influences the decisions made my its principals.