The Lost Boy of Chionia: Adrift in 1960s Italy

 

 

 The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia (2024)

By Juliet Grames

Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages

★★★★

 

If you've ever gone on a college J.Y.A. program, joined the Peace Corps, stationed overseas, or were a Fulbright scholar, at some point you were probably jarred to awareness that not everyone sees the world the same way you do. Ironically, sometimes it hits hardest for those seeking to connect to their roots, as in the case of an Italian-American in Italy. Imagine how much harder it might have been in 1960.

 

Francesca “Franca” Loftfield comes from an Italian American family of professionals. She's a Barnard grad who pursued a PhD at Oxford and Venice. She even married an Italian guy and moved to Rome. Franca had been in country long enough to be fluent in Italian and know the proverbial lay of the land.

 

Ahh! But Rome isn't the same as Calabria, and it's especially not like a remote village and the Aspromonte region. The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia takes us to a village that's a time warp in which the present and future take a back seat to the past. It's literally beyond where the road ends; a flood washed away the bridge that crosses the Amendola River and a waterfall. To get there, the bus stops at Bova, you walk for three hours, cross a plank over the river, and enter a world of tradition.

 

This is to be Franca's home for the next two years. She has walked away from her marriage and signed on with Child Rescue, a charity that plans to set up a nursery school in Santa Chionia. Her only other charge is to stick to Child Rescue’s mission. Officially, Mayor Stelitano, Father Pantaleone Bianco, and most area residents are enthusiastic. “Officially” every villager is a “Christian,” there are no Mafioso in the area, and everyone is a goatherder. Yet, Franca's warned never to walk alone at night, no one would dream of calling the carabinieri, there are clearly some rich locals, and everyone warns her that nothing will ever get done. Nonetheless, everyone has agendas that are outside of Child Rescue’s purview.

 

To her face they call Franca maestra (teacher), but that's not what they say behind her back. Her cranky landlord Cicca doesn't want her to turn on the electricity–a single light bulb–and the local diet consists of lots of lentils, borage, and spiky plants. The postal service is slow and the phone lines are always “out.” It doesn’t help that Franca pokes her nose into things that upset the locals–like the fate of a missing boy or noticing  that everyone seems to be related, perhaps too much so! They also harbor secrets and speak Griko, an Italian dialect mixed with Greek, which takes getting used to.  

 

Grames opens her novel with an epigraph: “The deepest despair that can take hold of a society is the fear that living honestly is futile.” It is, in many ways, the crux of the novel. Troubles bubble up regularly, but more attention is spent on tradition, resignation and rehashing old mysteries than in moving forward like a plucky American would do. Yet Franca can't resist being drawn into investigating the fate of locals said to have emigrated decades ago, the identity of a skeleton discovered in the foundation of the post office during a 1950s flood, an old photograph, local elections–whose results she fails to see are predetermined–domestic turmoil, legends, and the possibility that the village might be abandoned. Not to mention her own libido. Except for the latter, she's trapped between rules and customs.

 

Grames gives us a tale of culture clash, deception, mysteries faux and real, dishonesty, naivete, regret, and a young woman out of her depth. There is, though, some redemption amidst the deeper despair and futility. The Lost Boy requires concentration as there are few shortcuts to direct readers. Grames also often leaves it to readers to translate Griko and Italian terms and sometimes uses English vocabulary in nonstandard ways. Personally I appreciated her approach as it had the effect of encouraging close reading to keep tabs on who is playing whom and why. I did find it somewhat perplexing that Franca feels overly clueless and the novel’s villain is too easy to discern. Nonetheless, The Lost Boy of Chionia is a reminder that crossing either a washed-out bridge or cultural gaps requires going beyond preconceived expectations.

 

Rob Weir