Murder in Matera - Helene Sapinski

True crime stories are awesome--terrible, but awesome.  I just started listening to this amazing podcast, My Favorite Murder, which is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time.  I can't stop listening, or looking over my shoulder as I do so to make sure no one is lurking there with a large knife.  And so what could be better than a book combining true crime, history, and Italian food?

Murder in Matera is the story of Helene Stapinski's search for her family's fabled murder.  She grew up with her mother telling her stories of how her great-great-great (I think) grandmother, Vita, murdered someone in Matera, Italy, and fled to the United States with her children in tow, but lost one of them along the way.  Stapinski's family is apparently riddled with criminals, the most notable being her grandfather, Beansie, and she's haunted by a concern that criminality is a genetic trait and that she has passed it down to her children, and so she wants to "solve" the murder in order to figure out what happened...because apparently that will fix it?

There are some awesome things in this book and some things that bothered me.  First off, anything involving tracking down a murder--particularly one that took place over a century ago--is interesting.  Stapinski had to dig down into the archives of various towns in the region in order to find out what happened--with her great-great-great grandmother, grandfather, the padrone of the region, the children, etc.  She speaks some Italian but also hires a few locals to help her as researchers, and struggles with navigating the small-town atmospheres of the places she goes.  The scenery is clearly gorgeous and Stapinski captures it well, as she does with the food.  This is a book that will make you want to eat Italian food--all the Italian food, from fresh fruit to pasta puttanesca to pizza to--well, absolutely everything.  Even foods you don't like will sound good here.

But what I didn't like was when she takes broad liberties with Vita's story.  The actual details of the murder are eventually discovered, because they're contained in a court document.  But for Vita herself, Stapinski blatantly makes up her thoughts, feelings,a and actions, saying in the afterword that the relied on her "Gallitelli blood and bones" to know what her ancestor would have thought...which is ridiculous.  You can't just make up history.  The problem is that she wants Vita to be a saint, and so she decides that's how things must have been, without having any evidence of really knowing it.  Ascribing emotions and actions to people from the past without having any idea of what they actually did is a classic pitfall in talking about history, and Stapinski blunders into it full-throttle here.  These portions do not belong in a work of nonfiction.  Additionally, her obsessing about her children's genes got old quickly.  Apparently there is one study from Iceland about prisoners (or was it Finland?) that said many who committed violent crimes had a gene tied to aggression, but guess what?  You are not your genes!  Just because you have a gene tied to aggression doesn't mean you have to kill people!  In this way, Stapinski seems to throw her hands up in looking at the past, putting it all down to fate and not looking at responsibility for one's own actions, which really bothered me.

Overall, an okay book that could have been a good book, but strayed past its boundaries and into fiction instead of history too much.  The nonfiction portions are excellent, but the "creating stories out of whole cloth" portion left a bad taste in my mouth.

2 stars out of 5.

Beautiful Ruins - Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins could not be a more apt title for this book, because that is exactly what it is: the stories of the beautiful ruins of the characters' lives.  The plot revolves around three people: Dee Moray, Pasquale Tursi, and Michael Deane.  Dee first appears as a dying actress in the tiny Italian fishing town of Portovergona, where Pasquale is attempting to build a beach and a cliffside tennis court to draw American tourists to his tiny business, the Hotel Adequate View.  Michael Deane is the man who sent her there.  The story takes place in several different forms.  There is a "past" timeline, set over the course of a few days in the sixties, which is where the original action occurs; this timeline pops up every other chapter.  The chapter which do not take place in the sixties take place in a time known as "recently," with some additional characters (Michael Deane's much-aggrieved assistant, Claire Silvers, and the would-be script writer Shane Wheeler), or in other portions of the past.  There are also chapters out of books mentioned in the main course of the story, as well as a play excerpt and Shane's movie pitch.  It may seem disjointed, at first, but it all comes together beautifully (the theme word of this review, evidently) to show what each of the characters considers important, and what has shaped them into who they are.

The writing in this book was stunning.  It was, quite honestly, pure poetry.  There were times that it could have tended to be a bit "tell"-y, but Walter's narrative voice worked all of the description and action into a tight-woven tapestry that left a vivid picture of the book's events planted firmly in my head.  The language struggle is artfully and accurately portrayed--the lack of knowledge, the inability to convey the depth of emotion one desires with an inadequate vocabulary, the span of what, indeed, can be lost in translation.  The last chapter was almost complete exposition, and I normally hate that, but again, Walter paced it in a voice that left me in tears from the wealth of built-up emotion in this book and all of its beautifully ruined characters.  All of them are seriously flawed in some way, and none of them end up where they thought they would, but they all are charming and engaging, even the slimiest of them.  Walter ties up every loose end, not leaving you hanging about anyone, and weaves all of that into the sense of a larger story that all of us are involved in.

While words are easy to find when describing something you dislike, writing about something you love is typically challenging.  That's my problem in this review.  I loved Beautiful Ruins.  That's really all there is to it.

Five stars.