Doerr, Anthony. Four Seasons in Rome. Scribner (Simon & Schuster) New York 2007. Memoir; 2/26.

I enjoyed Doerr’s Pulitzer-winner All the Light We Cannot See and I was interested in this memoir because of having taken my family to Western Europe (France) for a year way back in 1992. The description of a family – in his case his wife and twin baby boys – away in a place where you don’t speak the language and don’t know the culture definitely brought back memories. Some of his experiences seemed quite similar to ours and his descriptions were illuminating.

Mr. Doerr who was already published and was working on more fiction, describes working in an American institution housing (apparently funded) artists and academics. It and his family were in the same Trastavere area southwest of the Tiber that we visited for a couple of weeks as travellers. It’s a former Jewish neighbourhood now gentrified with both locals and tourists full of small hotels, restaurants, shops, and residences.

Here are a few of the passages from the book and some of my own memories.

On almost their first day they go to a bakery. Through the glass doors I can see Shauna crouched over the boys, who are screaming. Everything swims. What are the words? Scusi? Permesso? We can live without bread. All year if we have to. I lower my head and grapple my way out. At the start of our year in France I remember on several occasions that terrible awkwardness and thinking, “No! I can’t do this. I’ve made a terrible mistake”.

Grown men, in suits, stop and crouch over the stroller and croon. Older men in particular. Che carini. Che belli. What cuties. What beauties. The stroller could be loaded with braying zebras and it would not attract any more attention.

On our last night on the road before arriving in Aix-en-Provence we slept in the VW van in a rest stop. I woke late at night to the sound of car crash. Four people in a car had entered the rest stop apparently at speed – possibly a driver fallen asleep? – striking parked vehicles. Thank God not us. The driver of the car was a young woman badly hurt and I helped as best I could. Doerr describes within a few days of arriving there a fatality on the road outside his apartment where pedestrians were killed by a car. Horrifying beyond description and somehow worse because of the unfamiliar traffic situation.

Reading some of this author’s appreciation of buildings, trees and flowers, museums etc I found myself wishing I had paid more attention not only on our family trip but on other voyages: Dawn stretches across the gardens, pulling tiny shadows out of the blades of grass, draining through the needles of the umbrella pines. The old walls look washed, almost new: a thousand speckled tints of bronze, trailing lacework of ivy, glossy tangles of capers.

They leave the babies with a new babysitter overnight: The stairwell is dark. The apartment door is locked. My heart disintegrates in my chest. We will never see our sons again. I will have to talk to uninterested police captains; I will have to learn the Italian word for abduction. (In fact the babysitter was wonderful and helped them through the whole year.)

Shauna drops a jar of mustard, which explodes on the kitchen floor and sends hundreds of mustardy glass fragments shooting across the tiles. Henry needs to be changed, Owen has woken up an hour too soon, a sinkful of bottles need to be washed, four dozen toys need to be put back in their cardboard box.

His wife faints and falls down and needs to be rushed to the hospital. I think I know some Italian and then my wife collapses in the kitchen and I realize I know nothing. (She was okay.)

He is fascinated by the age of the city, its buildings and its culture, and particularly the circumstances surrounding the death of a Pope that occurred while they were there. In 1274, Gregory X had the idea to lock all the cardinals in a room. Sleep there, relieve yourself there, eat there. One plate of food and one bowl of soup per day per man. After five days of stalemating, this would be reduced to bread, water, and wine. They couldn’t draw an income, couldn’t communicate with the outside world. The protocol has hardly changed in 730 years.

We had when we were in Trastevere on vacation a memorable meal at a restaurant just across the river but also an identical experience to the one he describes: We finish our meal in maybe two hours and wait another hour and a half for the bill. I try pleases, I point to my watch and say, “la babysitter . . .” “Va bene,” the waiter says. Okay. No problem. Still, we wait thirty more minutes. It comes when it comes. I’m sure this is just customary in Rome but honestly I wonder if it was exactly the same place!

Rome and Aix-en-Provence are different places – and there’s a lot of difference between Anthony Doerr and me! – but it’s surprising how familiar many of the experiences he describes felt to me. We also had three older kids with us, age 7 to 11, but I worried as Doerr also describes about the consequences of indulging the adventure of a whole year in an unfamiliar place where they don’t speak a lot of English. It was at times tough on our kids, the youngest experienced true French immersion, our middle boy had to switch from beloved ice hockey he was quite good at to soccer, and our preteen girl found the school social scene a bit competitive at times.

One encounters quite a variety of responses from shopkeepers who can get impatient, to plumbers and bank tellers and drivers on the road, to schoolteachers and neighbours who are often very kind but you know are wondering why the hell anybody but a damn fool would do what we were doing.

Would I do it again given the same circumstances and knowing what I knew afterwards? All things considered, absolutely.

8.0/8.5.