Télos, a novella trilogy

These three novellas — Piranesi, Argentina, and Modena — form a family saga. As their titles indicate, they begin in the fictional Italian port town of Piranesi that gave family its surname, then shift to Argentina, and later, by several routes, to Modena — roughly a century (mid-1920s to early 2020s).

The family was connected to its town’s grandees and later, through marriage, to the agrarian branch of a feudal dynasty based in Ferrara. As Luca Piranesi notes, it’s “something of a matriarchy.” Convent-schooled, the women used their bourgeois orthodoxy as a scrim while pursuing their desires. Luca, poet and the family’s fixer, is close to them across his long life. Other men figure as lovers, husbands, fathers, siblings, and cousins. The family persists despite episodic existential threats. The women’s journals, and Luca’s, set this down. Télos Trilogy has the nine-patch form beloved of my friend Sue Bender, the author of Plain and Simple.

Two writing classes led from Berlin by Clare Wigfall got this started. Laurie Snowden read and liked the first novella, which encouraged me to go on. Michael Parman once left a note on my desk that he expected me to write a novel. Here it is, more or less.