ENTERTAINMENT

New novel 'The Vietri Project' from UNCW grad is a smart, sexy, globe-hopping mystery

Ben Steelman
StarNews Correspondent
Nicola DeRobertis-Theye is the author of the novel "The Vietri Project." She was fiction editor for the UNCW literary magazine Ecotone while completing work on her MFA there in creative writing.

It's a championship season for the creative writing department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Their MFA alumnus Jason Mott was just nominated for the National Book Award for his latest novel, aptly titled "Hell of a Book." Another UNCW MFA, A.J. Gruse, recently had his debut novel, "Girl in the Walls" published by Ecco.

More:Wilmington-area author uses Black experience to pen 'Hell of a Book'

And Nicola DeRobertis-Theye made her triumphant return to campus last month after Harper's release of her debut novel "The Vietri Project." An Oakland, California, native, she was fiction editor for the UNCW literary magazine Ecotone while completing work on her MFA there.

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye is the author of the novel "The Vietri Project." She was fiction editor for the UNCW literary magazine Ecotone while completing work on her MFA there in creative writing.

If anything, "The Vietri Project" shows how cosmopolitan UNCW has become. The complex, multi-layered novel is primarily set in Rome, about as far from the Lower Cape Fear as one can get.

The narrator, whom we finally learn is named Gabriele, has been working at an academic bookstore in Berkeley, California. There, she handles hundreds of mail orders from one Signor Giordano Vietri in Rome: bizarre, arcane titles on a phenomenal range of subjects.

Eventually, at a turning point in her life (she's pushing 30 and feels as if she's done nothing), Gabriele resolves to drop everything and head to Rome to track Vietri down. Who is he? What is he doing?

It's hard to tell. Signor Vietri is not at home at his return address. He is not on the faculty of any Italian university. There barely appears to be a record of him. Gabriele's hunt becomes an obsession.

Our heroine, Gabriele is pretty much a loner. An only child, she rarely calls her loving but emotionally distant father. Her mother, an Italian-born engineer, disappeared into schizophrenia when Gabriele was only 11.

As a child, Gabriele spent many summers in Rome with her mother's relatives, but she mostly avoids contacting them. They're loving, but they tend to suck you into their network like the Borg. Gabriele values her privacy and her independence, and she tends to keep people, even her lovers, at an emotional arm's distance. (At least Gabriele enjoys a vigorous if not entirely satisfactory sex life, which helps keep the reader's attention.)

Eventually clues present themselves, but even these prove puzzling. One of the last books Vietri ordered was a kind of scrapbook, assembled by the elders of a Palestinian Arab village wiped off the map by one of the Arab-Israeli wars. The elders write down everything — crops, genealogy, wedding songs — in an effort to preserve the village's memory.

Gabriele finally learns that Vietri was born in 1920 in a poor village in southern Italy — a village made famous by a Jewish artist, who was exiled there by Mussolini's regime, and who wrote a famous memoir of his time there. Vietri might be one of the teenagers Vietri describes — or perhaps not.

This sounds much like "Christ Stopped at Eboli," a modern Italian classic by Carlo Levi. But DeRobertis-Theye's painter died in 1943 while Levi lived on till 1975.

After great effort, Gabriele locates Vietri's war records. (A recurring theme is that Italian records are tied in red tape, and nothing is digitized.) Apparently, he served at Tobruk and El Alamein before being captured. Yet contacts with other men in Vietri's unit lead to details of a horrific massacre committed by Italian troops during the invasion of Ethiopia.

Another thread finds Vietri as a witness in an abortive trial, somehow linked to a string of assassinations during the Cold War.

The reader soon notices that Gabriele responds more passionately, and less reservedly, to texts than she does to human beings. One of the book's running themes is how Gabriele emerges from her shell (and perhaps finds real love) as the ghost of Vietri fades into the shadows.

Much more is going on. This is a multi-layered book with many themes. With its bibliophilia and its whiff of magical realism, some readers might be reminded of Jorge Luis Borges. The deep dives into history with tentacles into the present can recall "Gravity's Rainbow" and other novels by Thomas Pynchon.

Yet DeRobertis-Theye has her own voice. She is eloquent in invoking the Eternal City — the parts of Rome that don't make it into Dan Brown novels, as Gabriele puts it — with its "Seussian trees" and sunsets as orange as Campari. This is the Rome where lunches seem to last for a week, where so many young people seem to have no jobs and no futures, but no one seems particularly hopeless.

(In a detour, Gabriele tries to link her elusive quarry to the Vietri brand of fine dinnerware. No such luck: Vietri, she notes, was founded in the early 1980s by three ladies from Hillsborough, NC.)

Like Gabriele's quest, "The Vietri Papers" takes considerable intellectual effort from readers. But it also has its particular rewards.

Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-616-1788 or peacebsteelman@gmail.com.

BOOK REVIEW

'THE VIETRI PROJECT'

By Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

Harper, $24.99