The Year of Our Love by Caterina Bonvicini

The Year of Our Love
By Caterina Bonvicini
Translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar
Other Press, 2021

Caterina Bonvicini’s novel Correva l’anno del nostro amore was published in Italy in 2014 and quickly became not only critically noticed but also beloved by readers. The beloved part is easy to understand: this story has virtually every element of popular fiction that readers tend to love. Its narrative spans many decades, from 1975 to roughly the present. It’s a love story. And perhaps most crucially, it’s a class story. 

The two main characters, Valerio Carnevale and Olivia Morganti, are little children and best friends when the novel opens, but even though they’re largely inseparable, they come from different worlds: Olivia is the favored daughter of the wealthy industrialist Morganti family, whereas Valerio is the son of the family’s gardener. Very early on in the book, when Italy is gripped with political violence that has the Morganti family thinking about emigrating, Valerio repeatedly reminds himself of what the family’s panicked actions demonstrate: that he’s not really one of them, regardless of how close he is with their daughter. 

Bonvicini spends just enough pages taking the reader inside that closeness, inside the opulent yet fearful world of kidnapping fears, armed guards on the way to and from school, and, as one character puts it, bombs going off like in wartime. Then she cuts the action and shifts the scene; much like the book’s two lovers, readers are never quite allowed to get completely comfortable in any era of the story before being whisked away to some new time. It’s la dolce vita, only starring Paolo and Francesca.

It’s an alluring template, hampered only slightly here by the fact that both Olivia and especially Valerio oscillate between being simpletons and being nonentities. All the narrative’s older characters, particularly Morganti grandmother Manon, are so consistently more interesting than the two stars that some readers may find themselves grumbling, “Must we sit with the children?”

But Valerio and Olivia don’t remain children, and that raises the second and far graver problem of this English-language version, The Year of Our Love: either this book is poorly translated, or all those critics heaping praise on the original in Le Monde and Le Figaro started drinking at lunch. 

Neither of those alternatives seems likely, and yet there’s no avoiding the words on the page: one of them must be true. It would be baffling if the problem originated with translator Antony Shugaar, since he’s been doing absolutely excellent work for many decades and thus unlikely to be fumbling the job at this late date. But if it’s not Shugaar, then it’s Bonvicini, who’s been selling sheds of books and winning shelves of awards for well over ten years. 

Neither author nor translator seems like a convincing culprit, but somebody’s guilty of the many, many crimes against style, imagery, and even diction that fill almost every page of this book. Take this passage, which occurs after nine years have passed since Valerio and Olivia have seen each other. They’ve lived separate lives, and they aren’t children any longer, and Valerio receives a formal invitation to Olivia’s 18th birthday party:

My simplest doubts were bound up with two words printed at the bottom of the card, on the right: Black Tie. I knew exactly what they meant, because my mother had worked her fingers to the bone so that she could enroll me in the classical high school, and to be exact, one of the finest schools in Rome, where she informed me that I’d have the opportunity to rub shoulders with the city’s creme de la creme. And in fact, that’s exactly what had happened, though in point of fact that creme turned out to be dregs, people who were only interested, when all was said and done, in narcotics, even worse than back at the borgata, but that’s just how it went. To make a long story short, invitations like that one were common enough in my own class at school. Just not ones that were addressed to me.

Yes, it’s effective: Bonvicini never allows Valerio to forget the below-stairs nature of his origins. But it’s also atrocious; no Creative Writing undergraduate anywhere in the world would be allowed to turn in such a passage as a final product. Valerio’s mother works her fingers to the bone; Valerio rubs shoulders with his well-born classmates; Valerio uses a cliche to describe them and then elaborates on the cliche; “when all was said and done … that’s just how it went”; “to make a long story short,” Valerio says, even though a) that, too, is a cliche, and b) he hasn’t … and so on, just in one torturous little paragraph. There are hundreds of paragraphs like that one throughout this book, and that has to be somebody’s fault. Either Bonvicini’s original prose is every bit as choked with the Italian originals of all these cliches and lazy idioms, or else Shugaar decided to leaven out a lifetime of excellent translations by tossing up a lousy one. 

Regardless of who committed the crime, the victim is obvious: if the reader can master the mental gymnastics of enjoying a story while overlooking practically everything about how that story is executed, then The Year of Our Love (in this very prettily designed edition from Other Press) will certainly exert real charm. And considering the largely deplorable state of contemporary fiction (what are all those MFA programs charging for, one has to wonder?), maybe those gymnastics are worth mastering. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.