logdog42's review
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
2.0
Maybe I was misinformed going into this, but I thought this was going to be a biography about Helene's great great grandmother. It turned out to be a memoir about the time that she studied a murder that her great great grandmother committed. A neat story I suppose, and I'm sure it means a LOT to her and her family to have an answer to this mystery! But it didn't mean much to me
12roxy's review against another edition
2.0
Good description of the detailed archival work and daily adventures of researching family history in Basilicata mixed abruptly with odd historical fiction sections, and all laced with a draining sense of the personal obsessions of the author. I would have preferred two books, and I would not have bothered to read the pulpy fictional one.
siria's review against another edition
2.0
Helene Stapinski's strong narrative voice drew me into this book, but ultimately Murder in Matera's failure to decide what kind of book it wanted to be meant that it lost me long before the end. Is this a work of history? A piece of historical fiction based on a true story? A meditation on immigration and familial identity? A travelogue? Stapinski makes feints in all these directions and more, as she explores the life of her great-great-grandmother, Vita Gallitelli, whose immigration to the US in the 1890s supposedly came hot on the heels of her having murdered someone. Stapinski travels to Italy to research Vita's story, passed down through her New Jersey Italian family for generations, to find out what really happened and to "solve" the murder.
Now, if she'd really bothered to sit down with a historian or genealogist before she undertook this, Stapinski would have been, 1. Swiftly disabused of the notion that you can find out what "really" happened at a remove of more than a century, 2. Told she couldn't base part of her argument for what "really happened" on customs like prima notte because that's myth, not fact, and 3. Not been able to talk about her "decade-long search for the truth" because she would have been pointed quickly and efficiently towards the neatly-organised archives where birth, death, and marriage certificates, and records of criminal trials, were all indexed and waiting for her to just request the right file. Yet one gets the feeling that Stapinski deliberately postpones those parts of her narrative, because it's not as thrilling as her going to caves once inhabited by medieval hermits and declaring that the scriptural scenes painted on the cave walls provided clues to help her figure out what really happened.
(I don't know if that was the part of the book that frustrated me the most, or if it was Stapinski's declaration that finding out that great-great-grandmother Vita wasn't really a murder relieved her of her fears that her children might have inherited unusually violent genetic tendencies. No, instead now it's just her grandfather who was a life-long criminal and murderer! Plus all the other petty crooks in the family! To make it clear, I don't think that any of those things are going to have an impact on Stapinski's children either: just pointing out the sheer illogic of her train of thought, something which she apparently never realises. Instead, she ends up hailing her great-great-grandmother for her moxie and foresight in emigrating to the US, an act which Stapinski directly credits with allowing her to have a "blessed life", skipping over, well, all the generations of struggle, poverty, and criminality in between.)
If Murder in Matera had been edited down to a longer piece in the New Yorker or a similar magazine, it might have worked. Stapinski would have been forced to edit out some of her conjecture and more melodramatic sorties, or the swathes of material that seem to have been pulled at random from Wikipedia. (Part of the story hinges on pears. Did we need a whole section on pears in history, literature, and myth from places as far afield as China? No.)
Now, if she'd really bothered to sit down with a historian or genealogist before she undertook this, Stapinski would have been, 1. Swiftly disabused of the notion that you can find out what "really" happened at a remove of more than a century, 2. Told she couldn't base part of her argument for what "really happened" on customs like prima notte because that's myth, not fact, and 3. Not been able to talk about her "decade-long search for the truth" because she would have been pointed quickly and efficiently towards the neatly-organised archives where birth, death, and marriage certificates, and records of criminal trials, were all indexed and waiting for her to just request the right file. Yet one gets the feeling that Stapinski deliberately postpones those parts of her narrative, because it's not as thrilling as her going to caves once inhabited by medieval hermits and declaring that the scriptural scenes painted on the cave walls provided clues to help her figure out what really happened.
(I don't know if that was the part of the book that frustrated me the most, or if it was Stapinski's declaration that finding out that great-great-grandmother Vita wasn't really a murder relieved her of her fears that her children might have inherited unusually violent genetic tendencies. No, instead now it's just her grandfather who was a life-long criminal and murderer! Plus all the other petty crooks in the family! To make it clear, I don't think that any of those things are going to have an impact on Stapinski's children either: just pointing out the sheer illogic of her train of thought, something which she apparently never realises. Instead, she ends up hailing her great-great-grandmother for her moxie and foresight in emigrating to the US, an act which Stapinski directly credits with allowing her to have a "blessed life", skipping over, well, all the generations of struggle, poverty, and criminality in between.)
If Murder in Matera had been edited down to a longer piece in the New Yorker or a similar magazine, it might have worked. Stapinski would have been forced to edit out some of her conjecture and more melodramatic sorties, or the swathes of material that seem to have been pulled at random from Wikipedia. (Part of the story hinges on pears. Did we need a whole section on pears in history, literature, and myth from places as far afield as China? No.)
aya1081's review
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Rape, Child death, Murder, and Violence
coldbuckwheatnoodles's review
2.0
I was quite intrigued by the plot of the book but to be honest I didn't like it all too much. First of all, I did find it weird that Stapinski wrote so intimately about the thoughts of her ancestors with no way of knowing how it all exactly went down. Writing about the thoughts, emotions and actions of people from over a century ago took me out of the story and her position as writer and seeker of her family story. It seemed too made up and a lot of guess work, e.g. when she writes that Vita was scared and her son was paving the way, to me that didn't add up to the personality of Vita and made the image of the author as the researcher fade. I would have rather had facts and more uncertainty than plotting a scene completely and presenting it as truth (justifying the guess work by her "Gallitelli blood"), that's not investigative journalism to me. On top of that, a lot of the authors views made it hard for me to relate to what she was experiencing etc. The author is very set in biological determinism and "criminal blood" threatening her family from the inside which I find strange. Moreover, she perpetuates gender binarism and is constantly slut shaming women. Her worldview seems to be divided into good and bad which is a bummer and I could not relate to her faith either. These all are personal views and problems I had with the book of course. Her writing style was ok. And I did like the search for a family story and how to go about that.
chelsea_not_chels's review
2.0
More reviews available at my blog, Beauty and the Bookworm.
True crime stories are awesome--terrible, but awesome. I just started listening to this amazing podcast, My Favorite Murder, which is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time. I can't stop listening, or looking over my shoulder as I do so to make sure no one is lurking there with a large knife. And so what could be better than a book combining true crime, history, and Italian food?
Murder in Matera is the story of Helene Stapinski's search for her family's fabled murder. She grew up with her mother telling her stories of how her great-great-great (I think) grandmother, Vita, murdered someone in Matera, Italy, and fled to the United States with her children in tow, but lost one of them along the way. Stapinski's family is apparently riddled with criminals, the most notable being her grandfather, Beansie, and she's haunted by a concern that criminality is a genetic trait and that she has passed it down to her children, and so she wants to "solve" the murder in order to figure out what happened...because apparently that will fix it?
There are some awesome things in this book and some things that bothered me. First off, anything involving tracking down a murder--particularly one that took place over a century ago--is interesting. Stapinski had to dig down into the archives of various towns in the region in order to find out what happened--with her great-great-great grandmother, grandfather, the padrone of the region, the children, etc. She speaks some Italian but also hires a few locals to help her as researchers, and struggles with navigating the small-town atmospheres of the places she goes. The scenery is clearly gorgeous and Stapinski captures it well, as she does with the food. This is a book that will make you want to eat Italian food--all the Italian food, from fresh fruit to pasta puttanesca to pizza to--well, absolutely everything. Even foods you don't like will sound good here.
But what I didn't like was when she takes broad liberties with Vita's story. The actual details of the murder are eventually discovered, because they're contained in a court document. But for Vita herself, Stapinski blatantly makes up her thoughts, feelings,a and actions, saying in the afterword that the relied on her "Gallitelli blood and bones" to know what her ancestor would have thought...which is ridiculous. You can't just make up history. The problem is that she wants Vita to be a saint, and so she decides that's how things must have been, without having any evidence of really knowing it. Ascribing emotions and actions to people from the past without having any idea of what they actually did is a classic pitfall in talking about history, and Stapinski blunders into it full-throttle here. These portions do not belong in a work of nonfiction. Additionally, her obsessing about her children's genes got old quickly. Apparently there is one study from Iceland about prisoners (or was it Finland?) that said many who committed violent crimes had a gene tied to aggression, but guess what? You are not your genes! Just because you have a gene tied to aggression doesn't mean you have to kill people! In this way, Stapinski seems to throw her hands up in looking at the past, putting it all down to fate and not looking at responsibility for one's own actions, which really bothered me.
Overall, an okay book that could have been a good book, but strayed past its boundaries and into fiction instead of history too much. The nonfiction portions are excellent, but the "creating stories out of whole cloth" portion left a bad taste in my mouth.
2 stars out of 5.
True crime stories are awesome--terrible, but awesome. I just started listening to this amazing podcast, My Favorite Murder, which is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time. I can't stop listening, or looking over my shoulder as I do so to make sure no one is lurking there with a large knife. And so what could be better than a book combining true crime, history, and Italian food?
Murder in Matera is the story of Helene Stapinski's search for her family's fabled murder. She grew up with her mother telling her stories of how her great-great-great (I think) grandmother, Vita, murdered someone in Matera, Italy, and fled to the United States with her children in tow, but lost one of them along the way. Stapinski's family is apparently riddled with criminals, the most notable being her grandfather, Beansie, and she's haunted by a concern that criminality is a genetic trait and that she has passed it down to her children, and so she wants to "solve" the murder in order to figure out what happened...because apparently that will fix it?
There are some awesome things in this book and some things that bothered me. First off, anything involving tracking down a murder--particularly one that took place over a century ago--is interesting. Stapinski had to dig down into the archives of various towns in the region in order to find out what happened--with her great-great-great grandmother, grandfather, the padrone of the region, the children, etc. She speaks some Italian but also hires a few locals to help her as researchers, and struggles with navigating the small-town atmospheres of the places she goes. The scenery is clearly gorgeous and Stapinski captures it well, as she does with the food. This is a book that will make you want to eat Italian food--all the Italian food, from fresh fruit to pasta puttanesca to pizza to--well, absolutely everything. Even foods you don't like will sound good here.
But what I didn't like was when she takes broad liberties with Vita's story. The actual details of the murder are eventually discovered, because they're contained in a court document. But for Vita herself, Stapinski blatantly makes up her thoughts, feelings,a and actions, saying in the afterword that the relied on her "Gallitelli blood and bones" to know what her ancestor would have thought...which is ridiculous. You can't just make up history. The problem is that she wants Vita to be a saint, and so she decides that's how things must have been, without having any evidence of really knowing it. Ascribing emotions and actions to people from the past without having any idea of what they actually did is a classic pitfall in talking about history, and Stapinski blunders into it full-throttle here. These portions do not belong in a work of nonfiction. Additionally, her obsessing about her children's genes got old quickly. Apparently there is one study from Iceland about prisoners (or was it Finland?) that said many who committed violent crimes had a gene tied to aggression, but guess what? You are not your genes! Just because you have a gene tied to aggression doesn't mean you have to kill people! In this way, Stapinski seems to throw her hands up in looking at the past, putting it all down to fate and not looking at responsibility for one's own actions, which really bothered me.
Overall, an okay book that could have been a good book, but strayed past its boundaries and into fiction instead of history too much. The nonfiction portions are excellent, but the "creating stories out of whole cloth" portion left a bad taste in my mouth.
2 stars out of 5.
lrconnol's review against another edition
4.0
The author attempts to trace the origin of a family story of murder in southern Italy committed by her great great grandmother. The book traces her travels back to her ancestors' home town and her frustrations and successes in tracing the story. Along the way there are frequent Italian cultural references, and words and attitudes from her Italian heritage. This half Italian reader found herself drawn into remembering her own childhood, and the words and foods she grew up with. So for me, this was not only a fascinating story of the search for truth but a romp through childhood memories and a renewal of my "Italian-ness". Italian or not, I heartily recommend this book for anyone who likes to read travel books, mysteries, or even just a well told story.