Review: Head above Water

By Stefano Bortolussi, translated by Anne Milano Appel. City Lights Books, 184 pages, $11.95 (paper).

For many, the images that come to mind at the mention of Milan are Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and supermodels. They certainly aren't those of a sweet, bumbling novelist getting seduced by a buff young woman while rowing on the mucky waters of an artificial lake. Such, however, is the opening of Stefano Bortolussi's Head above Water, a slim novel that recently won the 23rd annual Northern California Book Award for best translation and was also a finalist in the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Awards in the same category.

Cardo Mariano, the novel's novelist, is generally a good guy who in 10 years of marriage has never cheated on his wife. Why he one day does is a complicated issue. His wife, Solveig, a Norwegian, immediately figures out that her husband has been unfaithful, but instead of tossing him out on his can, she calmly goes home to her Lofoten Islands village so Cardo can work out his "confusion" on his own. It's not the act of infidelity that disturbs her; it's the timing: she's expecting their first baby. And therein lies Cardo's turmoil. To figure out why he's so afraid of impending fatherhood, he must delve into his past, including the childhood tragedy of his younger brother's accidental drowning and his own father's subsequent abandonment.

The book chugs along agreeably as Cardo stumbles down memory lane. The weakest bit comes toward the end, when a rather unbelievable coincidence occurs. Solveig, who keeps in contact with her husband via e-mail, decides to visit some childhood friends. One of them, a merchant seaman, tells her out of the blue that he knows an Italian, his ship's cook, a man who years ago left his wife and son to sail the seas. An Italian who left his wife and son? Well, there can't be many of those! This must, Solveig realizes, be Cardo's long-departed father. Alice Mattison wrote in a recent issue of the Writer's Chronicle that "coincidence is the way of creating the illusion of simultaneity." But coincidence can backfire if it brings the reader out of the story's dream. (Olivia Boler)