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leftyleo19's review against another edition
3.0
I was intrigued by the genealogy research aspects of this work. Alternating chapters are the author's fictionalized account of her ancestors, and in my opinion, took away from the actual story.
cbendixe's review against another edition
3.0
There is something about ancestor-search memoirs that gets to me every time, and this one is no different. Helene Stapinski goes in search of the truth to the family story about her great-great-great grandmother, Vita, a supposed murderess (if only I had the knowledge or resources to hunt down the truth of my family's stories! But I digress). The writing style is a little chatty at times, but the story of the murder and Vita and her family, her emigration to America, and the conditions she left behind in Southern Italy are compelling and suspenseful.
One thing that will stick with me is the total poverty of Italy in the 19th century, and the direct connection to the thousands and thousands of Italians who came to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The tide was only stemmed when lawmakers were convinced of the racial inferiority of the Italian "race" (as well as Eastern European Jews), and placed restrictions on the numbers of those allowed to enter the U.S. But Vita and her two sons made it, and made lives for themselves here. It brings to mind the chorus of the song "Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)" from The Hamilton Mixtape: a repetition of the line "Look how far I've come." This must be why ancestor-search stories get me every time.
One thing that will stick with me is the total poverty of Italy in the 19th century, and the direct connection to the thousands and thousands of Italians who came to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The tide was only stemmed when lawmakers were convinced of the racial inferiority of the Italian "race" (as well as Eastern European Jews), and placed restrictions on the numbers of those allowed to enter the U.S. But Vita and her two sons made it, and made lives for themselves here. It brings to mind the chorus of the song "Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)" from The Hamilton Mixtape: a repetition of the line "Look how far I've come." This must be why ancestor-search stories get me every time.
maureenmacaire's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
slow-paced
3.5
reads like a journal/diary/stream of consciousness. very interesting once you’re in it, but a slow start
logdog42's review against another edition
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 against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child death, Rape, Violence, and Murder
coldbuckwheatnoodles's review against another edition
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.