"This Is The Garden" by Giulio Mozzi *****

• Summer read with Beth
• Open Letter publication
• Italian author
• Originally published in 2005
• Translation published in 2013
• Short Stories
• Epigraph:  "This is the garden; when you look it's far/too bright and burns your eyes/and so you turn away, although you know/that everything is real, everything you see/is real, and through time life unwinds/and is complete..." - Claudio Damiani, from "Il giardino del mio amore" ("The Garden of My Love": Fraturno, Rome:Abete 1987
• "Cover Letter":
• Purse snatcher returns letters from snatched puse and a letter explaining himself
• p.4...."You should never own something you didn't desire first...."
• p.10..."Department stores are easy places to work; they're fascinating, too, and here's why:  they're like gardens of delight, and that's just beautiful.
• p.16..."......there's only one possible world, and that's the world you see with your eyes open; the other world, the one you see with your eyes closed, is too dangerous a place."
• p.17..."...a letter is 'some kind of trail marker leading to a human creature, along a path where you grow happier with every step, until one bright moment when you realize you''re not moving forward at all, just going round and round in your own labyrinth, only you're more excited, more confused than normal."
• "You might say that in some letters, maybe all letters, the important thing is only said after the final sentence, in the silence that follows."
• "The Apprentice":
• An apprentice in a manufacturing facility hopes for a big future and slowly realizes it will likely never happen.....disillusionment
• p.37..."...if he enjoys his work it is not a punishment."...."....these people, he thinks, will work their entire lives without gaining the most important thing they can from work, what follows punishment:  freedom from sin, and so, the happiness to come.
• p.40..."...the apprentice treats every event in his life, even if it seems disagreeable, or degrading, or dangerous at the time, as one fragment of a lesson that will come together in the end and review itself as ordered, finished, justified:  it's up to him, the apprentice, the one whose reason for being is to learn, to put the parts of this lesson together and not reject any of them from the start..."
• p.42..."...this gets him thinking that there must be something about the worker's trade, something mysterious, invisible, that reduces brain capacity and locks a person inside a few predictable movements, a few thinkable thoughts..."
• p.43..."...his head is filled with thoughts that follow from his work, that drive him back, that pull away from everything, thoughts that explore, with deep uncertainty, the meaning and nature of his life--of every life--of the movement he's just made with his right hand."...man's eternal search for meaning
• "On The Publication of My First Book":
• Loss of privacy of first time published author....ambivalence...expressed in a book talk at a bookstore, he is a delivery person
• p.49..."But here, after these poems full of pain and nihilism, clapping, quite frankly, seemed almost uncivil."
• Fearfulness and need to be prepared for harsh future experienced when raised by parents who struggled as immigrants or poverty
• p.57..."All my imaginings were left to wander the world, beyond my control."...once his ideas and private thoughts are published he loses control
• p.59..."In my stories, the events seem determined, which wasn't true when these events occurred."
• p.59..."I think the relationship between things told in stories and things that actually happened is a bit like the relationship between daily events and then the transformation of these events in our dreams at night.
• Saw a rooftop garden...gave him a different perspective..."I'd traveled by train, hurried, come to this cold, stinking place, to bring my tiny and not so tiny offering--a photo that contained my soul--to this enormous building that housed a god who'd demanded my offering, but probably didn't even notice when he got it."
• Closing line:..."The books I've read have taught me many things, but above all, they've taught me to preserve my life and to tuck my voice away inside my life and keep it safe--my voice, unique and private:  my unique treasure and my health.  I love you all."
• "Claw":
• Per translator's note, Yanez is the sidekick of Sandokan, a pirate in a series of adventure novels by the 19th century Italian writer Emilio Salgari
• Aged man lives outside Indian village, served daily by a village woman, he remains silent so the villagers create their ideas of his life
• English "saint", priest comes to the village to convert, stays a year, hears Yanez' confession
• Yanez realizes three gifts before death:
• From Sandokan's death at a young age:  "...the lesson that all lives are different, and each ends as it should."
• From the village woman:  his desire for wisdom, for she revered it
• From the priest:  forgiveness
• The three gifts allow Yanez to give himself, in prayer, to God
• "Trains":
• Mario traveling by train to Rome, he is a delivery man for a bookstore
• p.74....."To Mario, the dreams you can't remember are the most important kind--they protect your vital secrets."
• He likes train travel because there is no stopping once you start.....like a train of thought?
• "Glass":
• Having window panes replaced leads to shards of glass in the grass below......
• p.87..."Last Sunday while I was gathering shards, I started thinking that it's almost like tyrying to gather important memories, that you have to look for memories in something like gravel, something so indistinct from far away and so varied close up, it'll make your head spin."
• p.87..."I understand now that gathering shards strengthens my soul, comforts it, helps it to see that even if the windows have shattered, they can still be recovered, piece by piece."
• p.88..."I've come to think that each part of the soul is the entire soul, and that the entire soul is made up of infinite parts, like shards of glass, like gravel, like the surface of the wall.
• "Tana":
• "tana" means burrow in Italian, per translator's note
• Tana finds a male angel, named Roberta, on  the street and brings it home
• Fever dream
• ":F.":
• Epigraph:  "It's all theater.  When they decide to, the mafia will kill me anyway." - Giovanni Falcone
• A magistrate is under lock and key as he presides over a mafia case,
• His security head is named Arcangelo, head of his "guardian angels"
• p.117..."All those who dreamed of bringing back a paradise on earth just wound up producing indiscriminate terror...."...he was told when trying to arrest a mafia member earlier in his career
• You cannot go back....all you have are memories
• Review:  An absolutely  wonderful short story collection.  Each story is so well written and drew me in completely.  The author evokes a sense of pain and loss in each story and the eternal search for that which is gone.  Memories seem to be the only thing we can cling to in the author's view, and their retrieval is bittersweet.  There is a distinct focus on the value of our dreamworld in our lives, all that occurs when our mind and spirit are allowed to run free.  I found these stories to be engaging and poignant both individually and as a connected whole.