Transatlantic Passages: On Andrei Guruianu & Anthony Di Renzo’s ‘Dead Reckoning’
Book Review by Jen Corrigan
Jen Corrigan talks about the immigrant experience in Guruianu and Di Renzo’s transatlantic meditations on Europe and America.
Andrei Guruianu & Anthony Di Renzo
Essay and Poetry Collection | 230 Pages | 6” x 9” | Reviewed: Ebook
978–1–4384–6112–0 | First Edition | $19.95
Excelsior Editions | Albany, New York | BUY HERE
In the current political climate, news stories about children being separated from their parents and incarcerated is not uncommon to witness on our television sets. This Western anti-immigration sentiment has created a tense environment for countless families, particularly in the United States. During these fraught times, elevating the immigrant experience, particularly through art and narrative, is more important than ever. In their joint collection Dead Reckoning, Andrei Guruianu and Anthony Di Renzo explore the facets of their identities via a series of pieces stemming from broad topics that speak to their multiple homelands, the homes they’ve left and the homes they’ve found. A combination of prose poems and academic essays, this hybrid collection addresses everything from art, history, and politics, to the writers’ personal stories on the difficulties of balancing various elements of their identities, elements that are sometimes in conflict. In addressing their ambivalent opinions on favoring English over native languages, and the benefits and subsequent limitations on giving up a “foreign” name to assimilate more fully into American culture, Guruianu and Di Renzo confront the challenges of inhabiting the liminal space of being an immigrant in the United States. Dead Reckoning, named for the nautical term in which lost sailors must essentially guess where they’re going and pray that they’re right, is a collection that asks how people form identities and what it means to call a place home.
“My father is an interesting man without any hobbies. He is no longer passionate about anything. The secret is a part-time existence. The lesson is part-time everything. How to preserve states of too-honest emotion. He would make the perfect argument for an American fantasy — ornery, grumbling, my father thinks he can weave new endings to unfortunate beginnings.” (from “Zero-Sum”)
Although Guruianu and Di Renzo write from the same central themes, the ideas and arguments they each generate are profoundly individual and distinct; although we might speak of “the immigrant experience” in casual conversation as if it is a singular homogeneous narrative shared by all who arrive in a new country, Guruianu and Di Renzo’s unique insights assert that to erroneously conflate these stories is a grave misstep in understanding the way people inhabit the world. The book consists of ten sections that introduce such broad topics as memory, religion, philosophy, poetry, and art, on which each writer elaborates using his own national and personal histories as a jumping-off point. Although some of Guruianu and Di Renzo’s theses might overlap, the two are fundamentally different writers with recognizable styles: Guruianu is a poet from Romania, and Di Renzo is an essayist from Italy. They tackle these questions in myriad ways, often in entirely different forms. Their perspectives often diverge and then intersect, simultaneously illustrating the contrasts and similarities in their respective experiences.
Exploring even a single person’s life and cultural identity is an expansive enterprise, and this collection reflects that concept in its scope and length. Although I understand and appreciate the differing viewpoints and topics presented, I question the execution in some ways, particularly the decision to include so much in one volume at the risk of losing a sense of focus. While Guruianu and Di Renzo’s opinions often come together indirectly, there is never a point in which one writer comments on the other’s sections. For instance, Guruianu addresses how the horrors of Communist history are downplayed by the commodification of images depicting Che Guevara and Soviet propaganda, and Di Renzo draws parallels between Las Vegas and Venice in the way each locale Disneyfies culture and history, boiling whole nations down into novelties; while both writers examine the same problem, they do not do so in conversation with each other, which leads me to question why this collection was structured the way that it was. If Guruianu and Di Renzo’s contributions are able to exist very separately and strongly on their own, I struggle to see the benefit to including them in the same collection when there is so little purposeful dialogue between the pieces. Although there is not as clear of a connection between Guruianu and Di Renzo’s pieces as I would personally like, it is possible that other readers might find the openness of the conversations refreshing.
“‘Thus live waves,’ Nietzsche concluded. ‘Thus live we who will.’ If life is an endlessly recurring tide, then the cosmos has no purpose. If it has no purpose, it has no creator, no beginning or end. Time, therefore, is infinite. But because physical phenomena are finite, events must repeat themselves, exactly and forever.” (from “Nietzsche in Turin (Pt. 1)”)
From Rilke’s obsession with angels to the problematic way in which Westerners equate Romania with Dracula, the collection covers a vast amount of subjects significant to Di Renzo and Guruianu’s respective homelands. History buffs and readers with a general curiosity about world nations will enjoy the thorough and well-researched quality of the essays contained within. As someone who is neither well-traveled nor well-read in history or different cultures, Dead Reckoning provided me with a crash course in numerous areas of study related to Romania and Italy. Readers with an interest in nations outside of their own will appreciate the vast wealth of knowledge that this collection provides.
While I enjoyed the more informative essays in the collection, I was most drawn to the pieces that revealed a personal experience. As a whole, the collection gave me a clearer picture of Romania and Italy, but Guruianu and Di Renzo still remained mysteries in many ways. While Guruianu revealed more of his personal self via his poems, the abstract quality occasionally prevented me from understanding the viewpoint; I wasn’t always certain if these observations and images stemmed from Guruianu’s individual experiences or were reflections from a collective consciousness of Romanian speakers. I’m interested in the ways humans interact with and interpret the world, so the parts of this collection that resonated with me were the moments when the writers stepped away from academically presenting their homelands and instead addressed how their experience as immigrants shaped them personally.
“Every corner, every corbel, every column, de Chirico realized, possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. Every window gazed at him with mysterious, questioning eyes. The statue of Dante in front of the Basilica of Santa Croce, the Temple of Italian Glories where so many artists and statesmen were buried, seemed on the verge of coming to life. The waning sun bathed everything in a strange glow. Silence and calm reigned supreme. Words could not express this enigma, only images.” (from “The Disquieting Muses (Pt. 1)”)
These personal moments come in brief sparks throughout the collection, so the reader must look hard to find them. Little by little, Guruianu reveals the conflicted feelings he has about favoring English over his native tongue, his fraught relationship with the Romanian Orthodox Church, and memories of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist dictatorship in the 1980s. Likewise, Di Renzo presents his memories almost as if they were side notes; in “A Hole in the Sky (Pt. 1),” he begins by explaining the long tradition of puppeteers performing street shows of Carolingian epics in Palermo, Catania, and other towns. Di Renzo reveals a childhood anecdote about performing a version of this traditional puppet show for his friends when he moved to the United States. In a mishap, he tripped and destroyed the backdrop to his stage, inciting laughter from his audience, a group of people who would never understand the weight and significance of the story he wanted to share. It is via small snippets in these essays that we learn more about the narrators’ personal backgrounds. Interestingly, it is almost as if the writers can only examine their pasts by looking at their home countries in a broad sense.
“Not surprisingly, then, many immigrants remain in a state of perpetual childhood, regardless of how old they might be now, since this early phase of their life is frozen in time and cannot be revisited except on its own terms. The mind returns to the childhood scene of separation since this is the only way to make sense of its trauma. The primal wound becomes an eye to see, an ear to hear, a mouth to speak.” (from “The Eternal Children”)
Although I am not convinced that the structure of this collection is the most successful choice for conveying two separate viewpoints that don’t actively interact with each other, Dead Reckoning is a valuable read in many respects. Its informative essays provide the reader with an introductory course in Romanian and Italian history, art, politics, and other subjects, and the extensive wealth of knowledge serves to whet the reader’s appetite for learning more. Together, Guruianu and Di Renzo have constructed and compiled a book that celebrates the richness of their homes and how they interpret the meaning of the word entirely.
