Robert Viscusi – författare

An experiment in what the author terms “speculative history,” this novel tracks the movements of a man haunted by the spirit of his deceased mother and dogged by the notion that Astoria—the Italian neighborhood in Queens where his mother grew up in the 1920s—is the true capital of the world. In 1986, two years after his mother''s death, the narrator travels from Paris to New York to Rome, unable to escape the shadow of Napoleon, the historical figure he now associates with his mother. Weaving theory upon theory in an attempt to break the hold of these visions, he finds that she represents the fury, rage, and unappeased desire of migration and the displaced people left in its wake.

In this slim volume, everyday objects become moments and forces, acting upon each other and changing the course of history. A lone cat, an abandoned piano, and a morning cappuccino are all more important than they initially appear. Moving through and influencing the world, these seemingly banal objects demonstrate and bend the laws of time, making an entire world spring to life.

Examines the forces that have shaped Italian American writing, from the novels of John Fante to the musings of Tony Soprano.Winner of the 2006 Pietro Di Donato and John Fante Literary Award from The Grand Lodge of the Sons of Italy, New York State Robert Viscusi takes a comprehensive look at Italian American writing by exploring the connections between language and culture in Italian American experience and major literary texts. Italian immigrants, Viscusi argues, considered even their English to be a dialect of Italian, and therefore attempted to create an American English fully reflective of their historical, social, and cultural positions. This approach allows us to see Italian American purposes as profoundly situated in relation not only to American language and culture but also to Italian nationalist narratives in literary history as well as linguistic practice. Viscusi also situates Italian American writing within the "eccentric design" of American literature, and uses a multidisciplinary approach to read not only novels and poems, but also houses, maps, processions, videos, and other artifacts as texts.