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A review by siria
Murder in Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy by Helene Stapinski
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.)