Dandelions

Product Information

After cooling, pieces are blasted with grit and then fettled, smoothing the edges. Though much is still done by hand, “robots” were introduced eight years ago. “It's tough work,” says M Sallé, “and we're in a state of permanent innovation.” Avrebbe desiderato dare un bambino ad Antonio Maria Cervi per compensarlo dell'inconsolabile lutto per la morte dell fratello Annunzio, poeta, caduto giovanissimo in guerra. Il bambino avrebbe infatti dovuto chiamarsi Annunzio.” ([Antonia Pozzi] would have liked to give a child to Antonio Maria Cervi to make up for the inconsolable loss of the death of Cervi’s brother Annunzio, a poet who died very young during the war. In fact, the child would have been called Annunzio.” In “Note.” Antonia Pozzi:Tutte le opera, edited by Alessandra Cenni, p. 609. I carried the book around the house with me, meaning—I think—to read it between meals, chats and games of briscola. I left it lying about—a lazy, inchoate provocation, perhaps. And as usual, I scribbled notes in the margins and underlined more of the text than not, especially sentences that state the blatantly obvious, as if in preparation for an exam. For example: It has been coming for some time, this “resurgence,” another word we use when we talk about the far-right. Many would argue it has been coming since the very day Mussolini was shot dead by Partigiani resistants and strung up for all to see in Piazzale Loreto in the center of Milan: for some, the slaughtered leader, hanging upside down with his clothes torn and bloody, was a symbol of freedom and justice at last; for others, of martyrdom and a brave vision abruptly curtailed. Or deferred.

In Dandelions, her extraordinary debut, Thea Lenarduzzi pieces together her family history through four generations’ worth of migration between Italy and England, and the stories scattered like seeds along the way.The winner of the prize will be announced at an event featuring the shortlisted authors in conversation with the chair of the judges, Peter Parker, at the London Review Bookshop in Bury Place in London at 7 p.m. on 28th September 2023. The bonifica delle paludi—the reclamation of the swamps—was the propogandists’ dream come true. It was, they said, Italy’s panacea: once these wastelands were rendered fertile and buildable, people would no longer need to emigrate in search of a better life. Because, in a sense, the loss of thousands of fine, strong Italians had, for at least half a century, been the nation’s most debilitating illness. Not only was the constant population drain a source of embarrassment for the government—not to mention concern: Italians abroad were Italians out of control—but all too often the migrants themselves suffered great indignities. So, a promise was made: Italy’s total livable, farmable land would be increased by a third. take two. Dirce, then 24, moves to Manchester with her mother and a two-year-old son, Manlio. Leonardo, her husband, follows them shortly after. As Thea puts it, “On some level, she had always known she would try again to settle in England…if pre-Second World War Friuli had been tough, post-War Friuli was in some respects tougher.” Thea counts the various obstacles: the local industry in Maniago, which was heavily reliant on steel, had been “decimated” and the knife factory where her grandmother’s husband worked was withholding pay. Dandelions is spellbinding. Like the polished beads of a secular rosary, each bearing a remembrance, Lenarduzzi’s ancestral memoir conjures intimate histories of migration, love, and loss across decades of passages between Italy and England. Her redoubtable grandmother Dirce will lure you in, as she unfolds fragmentary myths with a sly wit, whispering ascolta, “listen”– and you won’t resist.’ Since Roman times, the plan had been to drain the swamps, to render them inhabitable and agriculturally useful. But successes were few and short-lived. Some say the fall of the Roman Empire can be linked to a particularly bad outbreak of malaria, or “Roman Fever,” as it was then known. (I write this a few months after the Italian government collapsed in disagreement over how to handle our own pandemic; the country is now on its sixty-ninth government since the end of the Second World War.)

An Italian get together in Longsight (Dirce and Leo third and fourth from left). Photo: Thea Lenarduzzi. A traffic warden in Cheetham Hill Bury Old Road. September 1956. Photo: WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Getty Images. Dirce had chosen a good time to move. As Dandelions recounts, the British Ministry for Labour launched their Official Italian Scheme in 1949, which recruited a skilled foreign workforce with experience in factories and mills. As well as the fictionalising that takes place in our own memories, real events often pass into something like family lore or legend.And then suddenly—really suddenly—the country opened up. Democracy arrived! People could vote! Go to church! Do whatever they wanted! And it was great. Or was it? Problems soon came, money ran out, violence erupted; there was mass disillusionment. ‘Freedom,’ it seemed, was not that great after all. I asked if it was malaria that took the first baby Manlio or the twins, but she didn’t know. “It’s possible. You prayed it wouldn’t happen but there were cases. The marshes were not far from here.” It’s taken time for Italian readers to appreciate that, but now I don’t think there would be any question that she’s one of the great twentieth-century writers. She’s really having a heyday now.

Dreams mean something to Nonna. She would not disagree with scientists who say that sleep is when our minds process the past, ours and others we have heard about, looking for patterns by which to understand the present and so prepare for the future. But dreams are more to her, more than preparations: they are predictions, divine interventions, with a language of their own, sometimes direct, other times oblique. Often, they feature animals. I say nothing when Nonna says such things. He was let down by those around him. He lost control of the generals. He was misled, people forget. These lines, residua of her formal education, I think, don’t seem to fit with the other things I know about her, so mostly, I let them wash over me and try to forget. I can’t bring myself to engage because, I confess, I’m frightened of what else might come out. We Blew Them Into Shards of Dust by Sean Stoker, an essay centred on one seven-second play in Ice Bowl II, about American football, television, brain trauma and politics, among other things. Sean Stoker is a writer from London. He studied documentary photography at the University of Wales, Newport and critical writing at the Royal College of Art.I was unfamiliar with Antonia Pozzi. Born in Milan in 1912, she lived a brief life, dying by suicide in 1938. She lived during a powerful time in Italian history. It’s true that her work is significantly underrepresented in translation; it is for the most part associated with Lawrence Venuti’s Breath, and in the UK, Peter Robinson’s Poems. She left among her papers diaries, notebooks, and over 300 poems. Her poems would be altered by those who desired to present her in what they perceived as the best light. First her father would censor the work, and then Eugenio Montale would offer praise that unwittingly illustrated the cultural predicament of women writers of her time and beyond. Roberto Pozzi alters the line by changing the “z” in “Annunzio” to a “c” so that what would be recognized as a name changes to the word “Annuncio.” This reads more as “announcement” or “herald,” and would not be more obviously associated with the given name Annunzio. The Sisyphean struggle against the waters continued for centuries, but the Fascist era into which Nonna was born brought an intensification. The aftermath of the First World War had seen a steep rise in cases of malaria, especially in the Veneto and the Friuli, where fighting had made it impossible to carry out routine maintenance of dredged lands. Quinine tablets were widely distributed, at great cost to the administration. I mean, there are tragedies and, perhaps, minor acts of heroism, but they weren’t, you know, executed by the Fascists, or didn’t risk life and limb to smuggle messages to partisans. Stepanova’s family didn’t meet the tragedy that you could have thought they might during the Second World War, because they were Jewish and bourgeois: doctors, engineers and intellectuals. They survived more or less in one piece. She writes about how, when she was younger, this used to embarrass her. She used to find it kind of shameful to admit that her ancestors—how did she put it?—made no attempt to make themselves remotely interesting. Next, impurities are removed with a long wooden spatula. Though the factory's work is increasingly automated, this stage requires a “human touch”, M Sallé says. The liquid is transferred to a casting machine, and poured into sand moulds, formed by “male” and “female” parts that fit together as you would imagine, leaving a 3mm space. The moulds are filled at a rate of 500 an hour, with each being used only once – “so each piece is unique”, Mme Lung adds. This requires an endless supply of sand (98 per cent of which is recycled), which is stored in towering blue vats intersected by yellow pipes and steel funnels. Richard Rogers himself might have designed it.