Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi

Dandelions

by Thea Lenarduzzi

In 2020, Thea Lenarduzzi won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize with the initial chapter of what would become her hauntingly beautiful debut – Dandelions.  Lenarduzzi was born and raised in Northern Italy, to an Italian father and an English mother. She now lives in the UK, in an uncanny reiteration – whether through destiny or choice – of the history of their forebears.  Her Italian-born grandparents and great-grandparents had settled for long spells in England first between the wars, then in the 1950s.  Dandelions is their story, told through the perspective of Lenarduzzi’s paternal grandmother, Nonna Dirce.  Hours of recorded interviews with the redoubtable matriarch are combined with the author’s own memories and distilled into a family history which, through a tale of loves gained and lost, joys and sorrows, deaths and new beginnings, explores the themes of identity and belonging over several generations. 

This memoir is as much the author’s own story as that of Nonna Dirce and her ancestors, a story lived in (and in between) two very different countries both of which were, in their own way, “home”.   The dandelions of the title are a potent and multi-faceted symbol.  They represent Nonna Dirce, who gathers them to prepare them as condiment to her dishes.  Their seeds, spreading far and wide on the breath of the wind, evoke the diaspora of whole communities who leave their country to settle down elsewhere.  They also remind us, however, of cultural differences – they are ubiquitous in both Italy and the UK, but in one country they are considered edible, in the other, not, thus highlighting the challenges of the immigrant experience:

All immigrants have narratives in which the mundane is ripe with symbolism, centred on moments in which the difference between them and us, the natives and the newcomers, are somehow distilled. We recycle abstruse parables, pass them down the generations, and find in them nourishment, confirmation of something never fully articulated... We Italians know how good gently wilted tarassaco tastes, once tossed with salt, perhaps a splash of vinegar or squeeze of lemon, and the essential olive oil, which, in England, you had to buy from the pharmacy back then (t’immagini? Can you imagine?). The British, on the other hand, do not. Dandelion and burdock is one thing, they’d say, picking weeds from a wasteland, something else entirely.       

Lenarduzzi poignantly expresses the often conflicting emotions of immigrants and persons with dual citizenship, who may call two countries their home and yet feel strangely out of place in either, a sense of “in-betweenness”.  There’s a certain serendipity in the fact that I read this memoir soon after Bejn Bejnejn by Palestinian-Maltese author Walhid Nabhan, a short story collection which explores the same theme of dual citizenship and (non-)belonging. At one point, Lenarduzzi conveys the strange but exquisite irony of her living for a time in France, physically half way between the two places she calls home.

By revising my attachments to England and Italy, I was performing a dual belonging which I did not confidently feel. There had always been a subtext of insufficiency, even fraudulence, about this hypthenated identity I had inherited – that I was not English enough to call myself English but not Italian enough to call myself Italian – and, in Paris, this intensified. To reach firmer ground, I pushed back against this other culture that now surrounded me.... The irony is that the betwixt and betweenness of being in a country that sat almost exactly halfway between these two places I call home was a fairly accurate reflection of the stuff in me.

Dandelions would have worked well enough as a lyrical family memoir, suffused with nostalgia and melancholy. But Lenarduzzi goes further.  Details from her family’s past trigger intriguing sociological and historical ruminations:  on the rise and fall of Fascism (and nagging, guilty doubts as the family’s wartime allegiances); Mussolini’s obsession with aviators; the racy romances or romanzi rosa of Amalia Negretti Odescalchi detta “Liala”; dark Friulian folklore courtesy of the writings Carlo Ginzburg; Garibaldi and the Risorgimento; the anni di piombo (literally the “years of lead”, marked by terroristic attacks by extremist groups); the differences between the packs of playing cards used in different regions of Italy, testament to the diverse historical and cultural influences which formed this relatively modern state.  Thus, one family’s memory trove becomes a microcosm reflecting the heritage of a whole country.

This book held a particular resonance for me since I come from Malta, which is so close to Italy and which is marked, thanks to own chequered history, by the same Mediterranean/British dichotomy experienced “in the flesh” by Lenarduzzi’s family.  But really it is a truly special debut which I would recommend to any reader.  It drew me in from its very first page, where Maniago, the small Italian town where Nonna Dirce was born, is described as a place “where the plains pucker along the seam of the north-eastern Alps”. It is an arresting metaphor and, we soon learn, a particularly appropriate one too since Dirce is a fine seamstress.  Small gems such as these pepper the text, making this a wonderful reading experience, and likely one of the best books I’ll read this year.

Expected publication

September 7, 2022 by Fitzcarraldo Editions