“A car accident claimed Katherine’s body, but my grief would nearly kill her memory,” he reports.
Then come the crash, the grief and the side effects. “The tension between the pronouns says it all: Although the ‘I’ belongs to Dante, his journey is also part of ‘our life.’ We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day.” With a few strokes, Luzzi makes Dante’s opening his own, draws the crucial parallel between Dante’s text and human experience, and points the reader toward the “dark wood” of his or her own life. “In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood,” the book begins, naturally. That she doesn’t live again in this heartfelt memoir, even as a muse, makes it something other than the work of art it might have been, and yet it lends the book a raw and unguarded candor. “Forty-five minutes after Isabel was born, Katherine died” - and Luzzi is thrust into the dark wood that gives his new book a title and a purpose. Isabel’s mother, Luzzi’s wife, did not survive.
Joseph Luzzi is alive, a professor of Italian at Bard College and the author of a 2014 memoir called “My Two Italies.” Alive, too, is his daughter, Isabel, who was delivered, six weeks premature, after her pregnant mother was involved in a car crash. It’s not fair - isn’t the loss of the beloved burden enough? - but it’s the way of art. Cut off from the beloved, condemned to a kind of hell, this writer then must return to the world of “solid things” and make the dead live through literary devices. The author of a grief memoir must do likewise. “The Divine Comedy” is a long poem about a lot of dead people, and Dante, no halfway believer in the hereafter, used his gifts - for speech, for the strong image, for extravagant simile - to bring them to life in words. Beatrice Portinari died at age 24 on June 8, 1290, and dozens of other figures in the “Commedia” were dead by the week in 1300 when Dante, poet and protagonist, crossed over to the other side.
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