Télos, a novella trilogy

These three novellas — Piranesi, Argentina, and Modena — form a family saga. As their titles indicate, the action shifts from the Italian port town that the Piranesi took as their surname to Argentina, and then, by several routes, to Modena, starting in the 1920s and ending in 2020s.

Intermarriage connected the Piranesi to the town’s grandees and also, through marriage, to the agrarian branch of an ancient dynasty based in Ferrara. As Luca Piranesi notes, his family “is something of a matriarchy.” Convent-schooled, the women used their bourgeois orthodoxy as a scrim behind which they lived out their several desires. A poet and the family’s fixer, Luca finds a place among them, beginning with his favorite cousin, Giulia. Other men figure in their lives as lovers, husbands, fathers, and brothers, playing their parts in the family’s unfolding despite episodic existential threats.

The family’s journals set this down and the trilogy draws on them. It takes the “nine-patch” form beloved of my friend Sue Bender. Two brilliant writing classes that Clare Wigfall taught from Berlin got it started, and then Laurie Snowden read and liked the first novella early on, which led me to extend it. My oldest son once left a note on my desk that he imagined I would write a novel. This is likely as close as I’ll get to fulfilling his expectation.