The Lost Father

Marina Warner is always interesting and worth reading, but for those of us who have lost a father, especially early in life, THIS book will hold a special fascination. It is really about the quest for identity in individuals and in families, the difficulties of this challenge which confronts all of us, and the ways in which these difficulties are enhanced by the absence of a male authority figure who is, say, taken by death, before we can define ourselves in opposition to or in reaction against him. For a young woman without a father, the task is to enter adulthood unescorted, without a test of her feminine power to charm; for a young man in that situation, it is to define himself without an Oedipal struggle or test of courage and manhood that involves the defeat -- if not literally the "killing," as Freud alleged by way of the Greek tragedy -- of the older "self." Myth and the dreaming faculty are shown in this work to be essential to human beings, who most genuinely and meaningfully "live" only in the stories they construct all the time. We are dreaming creatures, symbol-making animals, and our most powerful symbols eventually define us. Like Hamlet, whose words to his father's ghost are quoted in the title of this review, we aim to please most those fathers who are absent forever -- and whom we are, therefore, least likely to succeed in pleasing. Read this book.

Marina Warner's multiple award winning "Lost Father" is nothing less than a minor classic. Beautifully romantic and lyrical in style and content, it recalls one of those magical realism tinged three generation family sagas so typical of Latin novelists of today. The narrator is Anna, daughter of Fantina and grandaughter of second generation patriach Davide Pittagora of Rupe, Italy. Once married to but now divorced from an Englishman, Anna lives in London but undertakes a personal project of tracing and writing her family's history by interviewing her own mother. Piecing together bits and pieces fitfully remembered and sometimes imagined by Fantina (Davide's youngest daughter), Anna's story takes us from the Pittagoras' hometown of Rupe, then briefly to their new immigrant home in New York before their final return to Italy in the 1920s. It is a colourful story, filled with memories of love, friendship, loyalty and honour but also treachery and deceipt which tainted the unrequited love affair of Rosa and her brother Davide's best friend Tommasso, and spawned the mythological duel fought between Davide and Tommasso in defence of Rosa's honour. All this is told in grandiosely sweeping style against a backdrop of political upheaval as Italy enters its Fascist period under an unnamed "Leader" with ambitions to dominate the world. The flow of words from Warner's pen is unmatched in the incandescent beauty it produces. "Lost Father" positively shimmers. Jumbled up, its poetic and dreamy sequences resemble fragments snatched from the recesses of fading memory. It is a tour de force and should not be allowed to languish on old bookshelves. Go buy yourself a copy and read it.