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Summary: ...A perceptively nuanced exploration of city... and soul
Review: As an American woman who lived four profoundly instructive and enriching years in Genoa and Milan in the early '90s, working in my own way to fathom the intersections of our two cultures and to aid our dialogue as best I could, I applaud Wallis Wilde-Menozzi for this courageously honest and perceptively nuanced exploration of city, family and soul. I first read it at the gentle insistence of a wise Italian friend and former colleague who knew that Parma itself had long intrigued me -- but that I would find far more in its pages than any mere explication of the city itself. This beautiful book may be a bit too challenging for cross-cultural beginners -- but to anyone who knows what it is to live between two worlds, two languages, and two evolving identities, it offers real riches, and for those who love and try to understand Italy, it is a great gift.
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Summary: I touched part of my own life in Mother Tongue.
Review: I am an Italian who has worked in Italy strengthening cultural links between my country and America. For many years, I have lived experiencing differences and similarities between the peoples of these two countries! Imagine my surprise and delight when I found Mother Tongue, An American Life in Italy, which translates for me more deeply than anything I have read the lyrical, historical, and cultures--especially these two cultures. Yes, I said, page after page. Yes, I said, recognizing the laughter and pain of personal and social change, the mystery of nationality, the dephts of relationships and family ties. I touched part of my own life in Mother Tongue.
Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious claptrap
Review: If ranked on the scale of self-indulgence, this book beats "Under the Tuscan Sun" hands down, and this is not praise for Frances Mayes. On the strength of the too-kind-by-half editorial and customer reviews on this page, I bought this book hoping for an unromanticized picture of living in Italy. I got instead a maundering exercise in microscopic navel contemplation. Worse, every time a promising detail appears it somehow turns into an unwelcome sermon. This unpleasantly disjointed book veers off into irrelevancy so often and so distractedly one wonders if the author wouldn't benefit from a course of Ritalin therapy. It's true that there are scattered here and there tiny passages of insight into being in Italy as something other than a tourist, but they are too few, and frequently so obscure that I had to read passages three times to wring any meaning at all out of them. Three-quarters of the way through, the conviction that I was searching for pennies in a pigsty overcame my determination to slog through somehow: it just wasn't worth the effort. I'm not proposing this should have been something so prosaic as a travelogue; I was looking for the inner voice as well as practical knowledge. As someone who has studied in and traveled to Italy many times, I've warily considered moving there, and have sought out books that can provide real insight into living in Italy from an expatriate's perspective. "Tuscan Sun" wasn't it, because it really wasn't about living in Italy at all, and despite its relentless charm it was superficial and unconvincing. Equally unwelcome, though, are the dime-store philosophizing, the fractured polemics and the arty but artless syntactical histrionics of this work, particularly since there's so little real information contained in it.
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Summary: a spiritual journey filled with gems
Review: Mother Tongue is a book to savor. Those who want a rapid read or a linear account will be frustrated. The book's strength is in its "free association" style and its poetic richness.When asked to say what the book is about, readers'answers vary. "It is a book about the strength of women." "...about being a foreigner." "...about Parma, Italy." "about Family." "...about the differences in two cultures." "...about the importance of place." While this reader would agree with all of the above, it is more significantly a sharing of the spiritual journey that grows from enormous loss. In that sense it is the hero's journey. I am reminded of Dante's, "Midway along the journey of life I woke to find myself in some dark woods... How hard it is to tell what it was like, this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn... But if I would show the good that came of it/ I must talk about things other than the good." Wallis Wilde Menozzi's journey into a foreign land, with all of the "letting go" that is required by that literal leap, has at its heart the journey away from home that each of us makes in order to find the home within. Oneness and Separateness (the repeating of that first life journey where we must struggle with "Mine" and "Yours", "I" and "You") are achingly desribed, poetically expressed, and carefully crafted. Menozzi writes with a primal potent power. Menozzi draws upon rememberings, reflections, associations, images, dreams, architectural spaces, events, pets and neighbors, family life and historic figures who become mentors. Everything at hand becomes currency for the purchase of personhood. The stories of her historic mentors are particularly rich. For example she says to Ovid, "Admit it, Ovid, you were a complainer... To keep yourself alive you accepted the task of exploring myths, all you remembered about them... You captured the eternal inevitability of breakup and caprice and unstoppable tides... How Ovid, did you transmit so stunningly the unalterable power of a life's connection with events driven by the gods, if not because you entered an exploration of your own situation? You wrote, Ovid, starting from your feet's memory of ground... you took the paradox over and over and over: no one escapes change." It takes alot of courage to enter the dark woods and encounter monsters. This book is full of all the treasures that such a journey provides, ant the reader is the fortunate recipient of precious gems. Menozzi says it well when she says, "For me, the plummet into the unspoken had been something like prayer, private, internal, but infinite like sky. It was universal." It is that universality that resonates in the reader's soul, and issues in gratitude. This is a book to be turned to over and over. It's beauty lies in the fact that it can be opened anywhere and the eye will fall upon what Menozzi describes in a different context, as, "language that feeds and changes you, if you fall toward it."
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Summary: A sensitive portrayal of Italian and American culture
Review: Mother Tongue is an intimate and down-to-earth exploration of daily life as it emerges from Anglo-Saxon Protestant and Italian Catholic traditions. It is composed in twenty-nine brief sections. Readers will find little gems on almost every page which illuminate major questions of our time. I keep this book close at hand. It opens doors to cultural understanding. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi is an American writer who takes the reader into a culture in which the group and the community define daily life. American readers will find much here to yearn for, and much that they will not bear. So this book does not offer us any false and easy answers to our modern search from both community and individualism. Rather, we are engaged by one perceptive thought after another on the meaning of human relationships. "I didn't come in as an anthropologist, observing difference," she writes. "I came in as a human being looking for an open door." She has entered a small Catholic church in Parma, Italy, where she now lives with her Italian husband and her daughter. She wishes to be alone, to regain if only for a moment a sense of her own space in a society that gives her very little to herself. In Parma there is not much of a snese of the self, for the individual, at least not as Americans tend to understand individualism. It is a society that envelopes her. "Everyday as I write in my study at home, all that goes on crosses into my work. Space is not an idea. I have no maid. My child comes home and expects a hot lunch. My husband too, helpful and brilliant, still has no love of space; in fact, he wants to fill it in. The noise or upset about things not found or done--expectations seen from an oddly absolute perspective of what should happen in a home--are daily fireworks.' She is not always alone in the small church. "Last week an old white-haired man had his head on a pew and was down on his knees. It is moving to come upon someone in a cramped space, like going around a curve and meeting someone else's need head on. Community is a delicate definition that I can't articulate but feel." This is precisely what the author accomplishes. She feels daily life in Italy. She senses, smells, touches, hears, sees, and runs up against it. She is alive in it. Through her feelings she articulates community in Parma. Trying to locate herself, she searches for a way to express herself, always fearful that she is on the verge of being regarded as a GASATA, a windbag, a person who talks too much about herself, from herself. We learn how words and language are different in different places. We navigate between the public and the private. The author becomes particularly sensitive to the central place of women in the Italian past and present, and she wonders what American feminists would make of these women. From Parma, Wilde-Menozzi reflects on her life in America and on her youth in Wisconsin. America is the mental and physical place of open spaces. She has grown up in a big private home with three siblings and few friends. The pool filled with water is empty of kids. "In our rooms, behind closed doors, we talked to ourselves about contraventions and had lots of space to commit minor explorations. Above all, we began to read." "We were intense, frustrated innocents, formed in spaces unfilled by our parents--types that remain a mystery to Europeans, who think of America as avant-garde." Her husband's youth, on the other hand, was lived in a house that "boiled over with real life." "Parma runs rings around certain aspects of Midwestern sophistication." But this is not a simple book about an American who turns her back on her nation to become a convert to a new society. Far from it. Becoming more acutely aware what it is to be American, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi's admiration for her country's sense of public commitment, trust in others, of fairness, equality, and yes, of space, privacy, grows from abroad. And there is much about Parma that she simply cannot accept. "[W]hat most disgusts me is the [Italian]family's lack of trust in the larger world and the family's way of undermining conscience." Yet, at the same time, we read her saying that "Italian education forces you to organize and approach reality and history as problems distinct from yourself. If you are serious, you learn to bear frustration and to chastise sloth. If you get through, you'll be as good as anyone in the world, and perhaps more generous." This beautiful book emerges from the mind and the experiences of an author living in two cultures. She is inside of Parma and outside, close and distant. She admires and she deplores. We are offered this nuanced picture because Wallis Wilde-Menozzi didn't come in as an anthropologist to observe difference, but as a human being looking for an open door. Readers will feel enriched by joining her.
Rating: 
Summary: I wanted this book to succeed
Review: My grandfather was born in Parma and I lived in Italy for a few years as well, so I was delighted to hear about a book set in an area that very few Americans know about. Alas, this isn't the book I had hoped it would be. Yes, the author makes a few trenchant points--her complaint that Italians are essentally inward looking and suspicious is very true and bears repeating as other reviewers are done. And I sympathize with her difficulties of saying goodbye to her native language, and raising her American daughter as an Italian. Nevertheless, her book is far too disjointed and "arty". She states that she makes her living writing for literary little presses; this influence I think was ultimately a pernicious one. Did she really need to write Galileo's muttered aside to the Inquisition over and over again for almost a full page? Or draw a scream? I could go one with more examples, but you get the idea. Also, her use of only capitols to describe her friends may have protected their privacy, but it gives a curious distancing to their stories that is almost Victorian. I waded through this book just for the little gems on bread, etc. but I don't think it was worth the effort, and certainly not for someone who just wants an overview of Italian life. Pity, really.
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Summary: More than memoir
Review: This book examines related and ramifying themes: a complex accomodation to the writer's life abroad in her second marriage to a gifted Italian scientist, the life of her late Italian mother-in-law, the rewards and challenges of raising an American-born daughter in Italy, and the history of Parma as an expatriate discovers it. through an idiosyncratic and utterly charming progression of chapters. The gifted poet and essayist behind these reflections emerges in a self-portrait unobtrusively yet indelibly. Life and death challenge her, an adopted country both welcomes and resists her: a sensibility of great depth and nuance undergoes reshaping in the event. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi's subsequent book of lyrics, BEES AND OTHER POEMS (2001), carries this sensibility into free verse of distinction and agile grace. The prose here, like the poems printed subsequently, manifest an integral stylist, who inquires with sharp eye and open heart, and makes the connections that want to be made, both the elusive and the penetrating ones. A distinguished and inventive book. John Peck
Rating:
Summary: More than memoir
Review: This book examines related and ramifying themes: a complex accomodation to the writer's life abroad in her second marriage to a gifted Italian scientist, the life of her late Italian mother-in-law, the rewards and challenges of raising an American-born daughter in Italy, and the history of Parma as an expatriate discovers it. through an idiosyncratic and utterly charming progression of chapters. The gifted poet and essayist behind these reflections emerges in a self-portrait unobtrusively yet indelibly. Life and death challenge her, an adopted country both welcomes and resists her: a sensibility of great depth and nuance undergoes reshaping in the event. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi's subsequent book of lyrics, BEES AND OTHER POEMS (2001), carries this sensibility into free verse of distinction and agile grace. The prose here, like the poems printed subsequently, manifest an integral stylist, who inquires with sharp eye and open heart, and makes the connections that want to be made, both the elusive and the penetrating ones. A distinguished and inventive book. John Peck
Rating:
Summary: An alternative view of Italy
Review: This book is a welcome diversion from the self-indulgent, romanticized views of Italy provided by books like "Under the Tuscan Sun." As an American who once lived in Tuscany, I felt a sense of deja vu as I read Wilde-Menozzi's memoir, especially when she talked about the soul-splitting that can occur when you abandon the security of your own language and culture. People often talk about Italy in terms of light and warmth, but it can also be full of shadows, and one can't live there without coming to terms with both sides.This is a beautiful book, especially in that it embraces the paradoxes of two different cultures without favoring one over the other. It's not an easy read, but anyone who wants a better understanding of Italian life would benefit from it. I wish I'd had the book on hand while I was living overseas.
Rating:
Summary: An alternative view of Italy
Review: This book is a welcome diversion from the self-indulgent, romanticized views of Italy provided by books like "Under the Tuscan Sun." As an American who once lived in Tuscany, I felt a sense of deja vu as I read Wilde-Menozzi's memoir, especially when she talked about the soul-splitting that can occur when you abandon the security of your own language and culture. People often talk about Italy in terms of light and warmth, but it can also be full of shadows, and one can't live there without coming to terms with both sides.This is a beautiful book, especially in that it embraces the paradoxes of two different cultures without favoring one over the other. It's not an easy read, but anyone who wants a better understanding of Italian life would benefit from it. I wish I'd had the book on hand while I was living overseas.
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