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Summary
Summary
Welcome to LA? Nineties' Hollywood gets an Italian makeover in this poignant and ruefully funny coming-of-age novel featuring a teenage girl who's on shaky ground--in more ways than one.
Mere weeks after the 1992 riots that laid waste to Los Angeles, Eugenia, a typical Italian teenager, is rudely yanked from her privileged Roman milieu by her hippie-ish filmmaker parents and transplanted to the strange suburban world of the San Fernando Valley. With only the Virgin Mary to call on for guidance as her parents struggle to make it big, Hollywood fashion, she must navigate her huge new public high school, complete with Crips and Bloods and Persian gang members, and a car-based environment of 99-cent stores and obscure fast-food franchises and all-night raves. She forges friendships with Henry, who runs his mother's movie memorabilia store, and the bewitching Deva, who introduces her to the alternate cultural universe that is Topanga Canyon. And then the 1994 earthquake rocks the foundations not only of Eugenia's home but of the future she'd been imagining for herself.
Author Notes
CHIARA BARZINI is an Italian screen and fiction writer. She has lived and studied in the United States where she collaborated with Italian Vanity Fair, GQ, XL Repubblica, Rolling Stone Italy, Flair , and Marie Claire while publishing essays in American magazines such as the Village Voice , Harper's , Vogue , Interview Magazine , Vice , and Rolling Stone . Her fiction has appeared in BOMB Magazine , The Coffin Factory , Noon , The NY Tyrant , Vice , and Dazed & Confused . She is the author of the story collection Sister Stop Breathing (Calamari Press, 2012) and has written a variety screenplays for both television and film. Her most recent film work, Arianna , the coming of age story of an intersex adolescent, won numerous awards at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Italian Golden Globes, 2016.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Barzini's moving and provocative coming-of-age novel follows a character charging headlong into the chaos of adolescence. Uprooted from her home in Rome by parents with stars and dollar signs in their eyes, Eugenia is forced to forge a new life for herself in Van Nuys, Calif. They arrive destination shortly after the 1992 L.A. riots; the city and Eugenia's psyche are fragile and unsettled. After her only friend is killed in a gang-related incident, Eugenia becomes transfixed by a mysterious girl named Deva and the allure of Topanga Canyon. Feeling overlooked by her movie-making family, she reaches out for acceptance through experimentation with sex and drugs, crushing and rebuilding her identity as the days pass by. While Eugenia has normal teenage issues, her maturity and the collision of cultures and personalities she encounters make this novel richer and darker than a typical teen-angst story. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Eugenia is a teenager looking for her place in the world. This has been complicated by the fact that her hippie parents have decided to relocate from Rome to Los Angeles, chasing her father's dream of being a famous filmmaker. It is 1992, just after the Rodney King riots, and the family lands in Van Nuys, which is replete with gangs, drugs, and crime. Eugenia declares it the wrong place at the wrong time and sets out to make her way in a new school while vowing to return to Rome. She finds an escape through sex until she meets Deva, a mysterious and charming classmate. The novel has a strange juxtaposition of drama and leisure, reflecting Eugenia's inner and outer worlds. There are sex and drugs aplenty but also sweet, tender moments of first love and self-acceptance. Los Angeles is dirtily yet lovingly depicted. Though a stronger sense of time besides the bookends of the riots and an earthquake would enhance the novel, Barzini's is an impressive debut with a distinct point of view.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHO IS RICH? by Matthew Klam. (Random House, $17.) Rich Fischer, the protagonist of this novel of infidelity and middle age, is a cartoonist whose fame is fading. Unhappy at home, with his career coming to a slow standstill, he returns to an arts conference where he struck up an affair the previous summer. Klam, the author of the short story collection "Sam the Cat," brings a mordantly funny touch to existentially tragic circumstances. THE STARS IN OUR EYES: The Famous, the Infamous, and Why We Care Way Too Much About Them, by Julie Klam. (Riverhead, $16.) "I've always been enamored with celebrities," the author (Matthew Klam's sister) writes. She goes on to consider the bargains celebrities strike for fame, and examines why they've always been objects of keen fascination: Before the Kardashians there was Antony and Cleopatra. THINGS THAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE, by Chiara Barzini. (Anchor, $16.) In the early 1990s, Eugenia, an Italian teenager, is uprooted by her parents for the San Fernando Valley, as Los Angeles is racked by protests. "Barzini, truly a writer to watch, positions herself astride both American and Sicilian cultures, and packs this visceral book with strong sensations from both," our critic, Janet Maslin, wrote. THE GREAT NADAR: The Man Behind the Camera, by Adam Begley. (Tim Duggan, $16.) Begley offers a concise but satisfying biography of the 19th-century French photographer whose portraits of Parisian luminaries (Victor Hugo, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt) remain standout examples of the genre. His most significant work, from a six-year stretch, combines "an almost sculptural force of composition and lighting with an acute psychological penetration unmatched in their day," Luc Sante said here. THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN, by Orhan Pamuk. Translated by Ekin Oklap. (Vintage, $16.) A teenager's encounter in rural Turkey with a married traveling performer reverberates throughout his life in this moody novel. Pamuk's usual themes are on display: the East-West dialectic, the tensions between modernity and tradition, the relationship between secular and sacred, with Istanbul as both a backdrop and muse. ANTS AMONG ELEPHANTS: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, by Sujatha Gidla. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) The author, who was born into a low caste before leaving for the United States, offers an unsettling view of how discrimination, segregation and prejudice are very much alive in contemporary India. As she writes in this poignant memoir: "Your life is your caste, your caste is your life."
School Library Journal Review
Despite the distinctly 1990s setting, Barzini's dryly funny, sophisticated tale of angst and alienation will resonate with today's teens. Eugenia's parents relocate from Rome to the San Fernando Valley, where her father hopes to make it as a screenwriter. Absorbed by their own ambitions, Eugenia's parents leave her to fend for herself in a city still reeling from the 1992 riots. Finding it difficult to fit in (in part because of her limited knowledge of English), she resorts to casual sex to seek out companionship and power, choosing her male conquests carefully. But it is the beautiful Deva, from the isolated Topanga Canyon, who captures Eugenia's imagination and, eventually, her heart. Topanga Canyon is a magical, beguiling respite from the concrete wasteland where Eugenia lives, but the canyon is an insular community with a code of its own, and Eugenia is trespassing. Barzini's characterization of Eugenia is vivid and immediate, while the protagonist's parents offer welcome comic relief. -VERDICT Though sex, drugs, and alcohol figure prominently, this novel brilliantly portrays the teen experience-perfect for those who love coming-of-age stories.-Cary Frostick, formerly at Mary Riley Styles Public Library, Falls Church, VA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
An Italian teenager discovers sex, drugs, and decadence in Los Angeles.In May 1992, while shooting a commercial in Rome, director Ettore gleefully tells his family they will be moving to Hollywood, "where it's always summer," so he can pursue his dream of making a horror movie. His daughter, Eugenia, is horrified, especially after she watches news footage of the Los Angeles riots; the reality, she soon discovers, is as dispiriting as she feared. In a city still reeking of fumes, the family settles into run-down Van Nuys, furnishing their house with yard-sale purchases; Eugenia is thrust into a huge high school where students are warned not to wear gang colors, and no one, including teachers, has ever met an Italian. Barzini (Sister Stop Breathing, 2012) skewers Hollywood pretensions and Southern California teen culturevacuous, self-absorbed, insularand conveys, in graphic detail, Eugenia's strategy for dealing with her unhappiness: meaningless sex. Cloaked in a metaphorical "rubber suit" to ward off emotional involvement, she fills her life "with the presence of sex, as much as I could, as hard as I could," easily seducing classmates and adding to her conquests a depressed goth screenwriter hired by her father. Barzini invents a cast of disturbingly odd characters: embittered, misanthropic Henry, who supplies Eugenia with drugs and is missing an ear; a volatile, alcoholic former rock star; a hippie drug dealer who offers scream therapy; Eugenia's grandmother, who tongue-kisses her; two bored Valley girls who wind up abetting a murder; and many others. Eugenia idealizes Italy until a summer trip reveals a culture beset by misogyny, superstition, and violent cruelty. Back in California, she becomes enchanted by the canyons' natural beauty, where she feels "something primal"; has sex with a mysterious girl who may be having an incestuous affair with her father; and takes more drugs. Finally, in a rushed climax, an earthquake shatters her father's illusions about filmmaking and draws the dysfunctional family closer together. A coming-of-age novel that fails to delve beneath the surface. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 I was looking at my grandmother, sitting cross-legged and topless on El Matador Beach in Malibu, and remembered that we used to make out. She would stick her tongue out and I had to lick it. She called it the "tongue-to-tongue game." A soggy dumpling asking to be joined by mine. I couldn't say no. The smell of her saliva repelled me. I didn't like this activity, but I was told I should do it because she was old and I was a little girl. We played the game until I was eight. That day on the beach the vision of her pendulous naked breasts seemed as out of context as her tongue in my mouth did when I was little. I wondered what it was about my family. Why we could never make it right. I sat on a rock in front of the waves--tall, ferocious waves. Even though it was summer, it was freezing. The beach was empty. I hated my parents for bringing me there. They were both sprawled on the sand, leaning their heads against a pole that held a Shark Alert sign. Their bathing suits were in a heap on top of a Positano-style sarong. They lounged nude as if they were in a beach town off the Mediterranean Sea. The wind thrust sand and towels in my face. It was so strong, I couldn't even hear my brother's voice close to me, but our parents were content, like that was just exactly what they had in mind when they moved to California. It wasn't what I had in mind. My mother took four soggy cream-cheese sandwiches out of her bag and a gallon of warm water she'd bought at the gas station a few days earlier and left in the car. The water tasted like plastic. "Lunch!" She invited my brother and me over and kept smiling even though we were visibly angry. This made us angrier. "No thanks." We'd rather sit here and hate you, was what we thought. They moved into the shade, nibbling on their soggy sandwiches, chunks of cream cheese getting stuck in their pubic hair. Grandma graced us by putting her shirt back on for the duration of the picnic. I didn't want to be there. I wanted to be where the young people were, at the skate park we had passed on the highway coming in. If I was to live in that labyrinth of a city, that vast region, I should have the right to be with people my own age. But no, we were supposed to have lunch together, like a real Italian family. It was August of 1992. Three months before standing on that windy beach, our father had announced we would be moving to Hollywood to become rich and famous. What he didn't tell us was that we'd be moving to the vast and scorching basin that sprawled seamlessly for miles north of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley. "Don't you want to go where it's always summer?" he asked my brother and me during a shoot for a commercial for canned meat in Rome. Our entire family had been cast to be the national face of Italian Spam. This was encouraging, according to our father. A rich destiny awaited on the other side of the ocean. None of us had ever acted except as extras in our father's films, but the commercial's producers insisted. "You are perfect for our product! You look like you're related!" they screamed during our audition. We were promised extra money for this reason. "It'll be practice for Hollywood," our father said when we got the parts. In the commercial we had to act like a traditional Italian family: a sporty fifteen-year-old daughter, a kooky younger brother, and two unconditionally loving parents. We had lunch together on a terrace overlooking Saint Peter's Basilica--no waves, no sharks. The stylist put Band-Aids on my nipples because they got hard in the breeze. Girls were not supposed to have erect nipples. Our mother, Serena, dressed like a southern Italian housewife, a casalinga from the fifties, prepared a big salad topped with cadaverous red meat that had been duly molded, painted, and sprayed by the "food stylist" to deliver what the director called "a glorious, meaty glow." It smelled like dog food. "Who's hungry for thinly sliced vegetables on a bed of chopped meat?" she asked on camera. "Me! Me! Me!" my brother and I cried, raising our arms to the sky. "Time for a healthy lunch!" our father exclaimed, skipping over to the lavishly decked-out table after putting away the pot of azaleas he had just finished trimming. We chewed the meat and spat it in a bin by our chairs after each take. I liked acting as a perfect family. I liked seeing my father play a patriarchal role, watering plants on the aristocratic Roman terrace the production company had rented for the shoot. In real life he rejected authorities and institutions. He wore pink and aquamarine shirts, called himself an anarchist, and practiced yoga and Transcendental Meditation. Now he was forced to wear ordinary dad clothes and say ordinary dad things. In my mind that really was our practice for Hollywood. We needed to learn how to become a normal family. When I told my Roman schoolmates we were moving to America they all gasped. I should refuse to move to an imperialist country. America was evil. That was the bottom line. Ours was a politically active institution. Every year students conducted a sit-in on the school grounds to protest government decisions about public education. The real activists printed pamphlets and screamed communist slogans into megaphones. The rest of us liked the excuse of sleeping away from home. We camped in sleeping bags inside the freezing gym, smoked hash, and talked about "the system." Nobody washed for days. Halls were littered with cigarette butts, posters, and empty cartons of pizza--our only sustenance. Most of the boys had anxious Italian mothers who snuck home-cooked meals through the gates. They didn't want to look like mama's boys so they ate their food alone in the restrooms. One night Alessandro, the school's most popular political leader, woke us up in the gym and ordered everyone to follow him to the principal's office. "Get the girl who's moving to LA!" he screamed. He identified as Rastafarian even though he was white and came from Trastevere. He had not rinsed his dreadlocks in so long that one of them had hardened to the point of breaking off. It was said that he'd found so many lice eggs inside that it looked like a cannoli pastry. The old black-and-white television in the back of the principal's office showed images of a city under siege. It was Los Angeles. Alessandro looked at me and nodded his head. "This is where you're off to." News had arrived that the four police officers who were on trial for brutally beating the African American construction worker Rodney King had been acquitted. We had all seen images of the assault on television. It took place on a dark Los Angeles street and was videotaped by chance by a red-haired Argentinian who witnessed it from the balcony of his apartment. It was the first time that police brutality had been caught on tape and the video had gone viral even without the benefit of the Internet. The world expected justice. But justice didn't come, so half an hour after the acquittal, more than three hundred people started protesting in front of police headquarters. By that evening the protesters outnumbered the police officers. Riots, burning, and looting began. Sitting around the black-and-white TV in Rome, we felt like we were watching footage from a war. When I went home the following day I screamed at my parents that we could not move to a country where the police were allowed to beat people with impunity. Serena and Ettore had been politically active radicals in their youth. My father had been part of Autonomia Operaia, the autonomist leftist movement, in the seventies. If I had any sense of political justice ingrained in me, it was because of the stories he told us about workers' autonomy growing up. I thought I could count on their leftist ethos to change their minds. I was wrong. The riots went on for six consecutive days. I looked at the flaming streets from our television in Rome and tried to imagine our new home somewhere among those fires. While Los Angeles was facing the largest insurrection in the United States since the sixties, my family was packing boxes for our move. Our grandmother Celeste would come along to help us settle in California. She walked around the house shaking her head at everything we were leaving behind. "Poveri ragazzi," she kept saying about my brother and me. "Poor kids." Serena turned off the TV and handed me a copy of American Vogue. There was a photo of happy girls on a beach wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and bikinis. "This could be you. Try to look at the bright side." The Los Angeles airport was just a few miles from the epicenter of the riots. It was dusk when our airplane drew closer to the landing strip. I could see, amid the streets lined with identical one-story houses, a lack of something. An absence. Fifty-one men and seven women died in the riots--shot, burned, beaten to death, stabbed. That same airport where we were landing had been shut down by violence and then for cleanup. There had been fires, hundreds of buildings and homes burned down. Large parts of the city, famed for its lights, were still obscured. The power cut during the rioting left the south corner of the city in a dark hole. But the gloom I saw from the plane the day we arrived was not caused by lack of power. Order had been restored, but stores and businesses had shut down never to be rebuilt, leaving a sense of permanent dimness, like the bulb of a flashlight whose batteries were beginning to die. It felt like the city was still burning when we stepped off the airplane. Or maybe I was yet to get used to the incendiary quality of the warm Santa Ana, the "devil winds" that blew in from the desert. The sun set behind the freeway. As we drove toward our house, we saw police choppers in the sky, metallic dragonflies emitting shafts of white beams moving probingly over the concrete below. Our cat, Mao, who had traveled from Rome with us, miaowed inconsolably. Nothing felt welcoming, and my father knew it. It took us a long time to get to the house. My grandmother clutched her purse through the whole cab ride. "It's not like you're going to get mugged in a taxi!" my mother reproached her, but she would not let go. "Señora is right. We're in Van Nuys, barrio Nuys as the local gangs say," the cabdriver said with a smirk. "Better safe than sorry." "Visto, Serena?" my grandmother sniffed. "Marida was right. Whenever you told her you wanted to move out here, she always said it was the worst place to raise a family." Marida was my father's mother who had died earlier that year at the age of ninety. She had grown up drinking champagne and twirling pearls in her fingers, but a few years before her death, she'd been conned by a Vatican priest who took advantage of her Alzheimer's and asked her daily to withdraw large sums of money from her bank account to give to the church. She was convinced she could pay her way into heaven. By the time she died, there was very little left of the great inheritance my family was counting on. This, according to my father, was the reason why instead of living in Beverly Hills, like all decent filmmaking families, we had to live in barrio Nuys. We had smuggled her ashes with us. They'd been divided among her four sons and even though my father was angry at her for leaving him with no patrimony, he was also superstitious and felt that something bad might happen if he left his share of his dead mother in Rome. On the flight over she had come to him in a dream, explicitly telling him to go back to Rome and forget about Los Angeles and filmmaking altogether. In her lifetime she had refused to see most of my father's films. He invited her to premieres and even asked her to be his date the one time he had been accepted at the Cannes Film Festival, with a Pasolini-inspired story about a homosexual couple, but she bluntly declined. "I don't like stories about pederasts." Excerpted from Things That Happened Before the Earthquake: A Novel by Chiara Barzini All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.