Tomm McCarthy Reads Amelia Rosselli's Diary

A volume encompassing three separate texts ("unintentionally united"), Amelia Rosselli's Diario Ottuso ("Obtuse Diary") appeared as a bilingual edition in 2018 published by Entre Ríos Books and translated by Deborah Woodard, Roberta Antognini, and Dario De Pasquale. Rosselli's work that unfolds throughout this volume, McCarthy notes at Hyperallergic, is committed to "reexamining herself from different angles to seek a complete understanding of her feelings around a trauma of loss." Picking up there: 

The collection begins with “First Italian Prose,” the first prose Rosselli, a trilingual writer, wrote in Italian. In her afterword, “Narrative Experiments,” Rosselli writes that “First Italian Prose” was “inspired, precisely, by the Tiber, near which I lived. In part, it was written outdoors, while walking, and thus written by hand; or else these notes were taken mentally, and I would then transcribe that mental writing, once home.” A small world is created in this small section. From the first paragraphs, black houses surround a “barely agitated river,” with a white bridge. Readers are never taken beyond the river and the houses, yet each passage thereafter further explores tiny details within the same place.

There’s rhythm to “First Italian Prose.” Each paragraph is a reinterpretation of a remembered scene, built on top of the last, but in unexpected, nearly disjointed ways. In what seems like an account of the same walk repeated several times, every account is superimposed upon the last, making an unfamiliar form out of familiar experiences. Time’s passing feels palpable. What feels like weeks or more may pass between one paragraph and the next. Some passages seem to interrupt one another, taking it in turns to present different faces of a place or an object. Others are brief and choppy: “Gorgeous waiter you are the king of Italy you who bear and run for the chamomiles.”

The second section, “Note,” more closely resembles a diary. Written between January 1, 1967 and December 30, 1968, “Note’s” five passages cover nearly two years of Rosselli’s life. Each piece is written, Rosselli says, “from a single as-yet-unclear intention.” Passages in “Note” are difficult as a result of this unclarity, and Rosselli herself admits as much. They are dark and introspective, bitter or sarcastic, as they undertake the project of thinking through life and death. She writes, “Is it irreproachable? No—it’s empty and candid; black and sad, erotic in its foundations and moralistic in its debates contaminated by articulations and caskets.” The passage from which this quote is taken, “3/25/67,” describes “Note” like a thesis statement. Rosselli is at her most insecure and self-destructive and, for the first time, readers may feel that they are reading something private, and that a key is needed to contextualize what is being read.

Learn more at Hyperallergic.