Reviewed by Alicita Rodriguez
10.22.07

Like many other fiction writers, Anthony Doerr has turned his attention to memoir with his latest book, Four Seasons in Rome. After the success of his story collection, The Shell Collector, and debut novel, About Grace, Doerr has become somewhat of a household name—at least among those that read literary fiction; Doerr was recently named one of the best American novelists by Granta. However, Doerr restyles the memoir genre: Four Seasons in Rome is more microscope than looking glass. Doerr keeps himself at the margins of the story, acting as an observer rather than a subject, which allows him to focus on the objects of everyday life in Rome. And Doerr’s attention to detail transforms the quotidian into the marvelous.

Don’t let the book’s subtitle—On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the World—fool you. Four Seasons in Romeis not about twins or insomnia or the pope’s funeral; in fact, it is about nothing in particular. This is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Doerr does not attempt to shape his experiences living in Rome into a tidy plot infused with an overriding conflict, which might have been easy enough given what he had to deal with: raising twin boys, writing a third book, acculturating from town to city and America to Italy, and witnessing the pope’s death. For readers who want an overarching narrative, Four Seasons in Romewill disappoint. Yet Doerr’s resistance to create a convenient plot out of his own life is what makes this book so good. Doerr has written what a memoir should be: a confusing amalgam of stuff that doesn’t add up to much, because life, unlike fiction, can’t be crafted.

That isn’t to say that the telling of the life cannot be crafted, and it is in the telling that Doerr excels. Doerr is a master observer, able to analyze sensory experience into the tiniest slivers, thereby transforming the very thing he is describing. It comes as no surprise that Doerr’s book refers to Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian literary critic who believes that art should eliminate the automatic nature of perception, so that people might “recover the sensation of life.” Four Seasons in Romeis testament to Shkolvsky’s aesthetic philosophy. Take, for example, Doerr buying Parmigiano: “The gray-haired proprietor, wearing his white coat, a scientist of cheese, hacks our wedge off a wheel the size of a spare tire.” Or, a scene in which a man and his dog—“a massive dog, a Newfoundland, maybe a hundred pounds”—board a motorino: “The dog circles the scooter, sniffing. The man lights a cigarette and puts on a helmet and finally seats himself and nods to the dog—hardly a motion with his chin—and the dog scrambles onto the tiny platform in front of the man’s feet. Strings of drool swing from his jaw.”

To be sure, Rome has a lot to offer in terms of description, but the city’s charms have little to do with the beauty of Doerr’s prose. Doerr tackles even the dull and the ugly. Of his children’s teething, he writes, “I try to imagine sprouting big, round pieces of skeleton through my gums.” And dressing wet babies “is like trying to put pajamas on a mackerel.” However, Doerr’s longer passages about parenting sometimes fail, descending at times into preciousness. Regarding his feelings toward his own children, Doerr lapses into the indescribability syndrome: “It’s unqualifiable and almost certainly inexhaustible.” These moments, however, are rare. For the most part, Doerr takes advantage of his children’s presence: their perspective serves to refract habitualization.

Four Seasons in Romeavoids the facile notations regarding culture and language so common in other travel memoirs. Doerr is careful to choose only the most evocative moments wherein language yields confusion. When his wife loses consciousness and is hospitalized, Doerr cannot find the appropriate words to explain her physical symptoms. He states, “The word I know for ‘faint’ is indistinto.” This example unveils both a revelation about the nature of language and a serendipitous metaphor, because there is something strangely unsettling about fainting that renders the world indistinct, both for Doerr and his wife. Early in the book, Doerr admits that his culture shock will be twofold. Not only is he a country guy in a large city, but also he is an American in Europe. After this, he refuses to indulge in easy cross-cultural comparisons. Every detail that Doerr includes is beautiful in its complexity: “A town car slows beside us, a gloved hand on the wheel, red lace in the backseat, a Siamese cat on the rear window ledge.” Contrast this with a travel memoir I read a year ago that mentioned that women in France do not wear sneakers. Thank you, Mr. Doerr.

Four Seasons in Romeis written in present tense, a choice that limited the narration. It sometimes made the story feel a bit too fragmentary and it fought with the book’s seasonal organization, which obviously implies chronology. In the end, I decided that the positive effects of using present tense outweighed the negative. By giving the memoir immediacy, the present tense helped Doerr involve readers with his observations, so that the book became less about how Doerr observed Italy and more about how readers did. Ultimately, Doerr has written a memoir that is not self-indulgent. In fact, Four Seasons in Romeis humble, almost selfless. Here is a memoir that is decidedly not about its author: it is about the nature of perception and interpretation. And luckily, readers get to examine consciousness in the great city of Rome, amidst “terra-cotta roofs,” “the scattered green of terraced gardens,” and “astounding trees, trees both unruly and composed at once, like princes who sleep stock-still but dream swarming dreams.”