THE VIETRI PROJECT

A mysterious man becomes the object of a young woman's quest.

As the newest hire at a Berkeley bookshop, Gabriele is assigned to what the staff calls “the Vietri Project,” fulfilling orders from one Giordano Vietri, in Rome. Over the course of two and a half years, sending him more than 1,000 books on assorted esoteric topics—including mysticism, Native American medicine, shamanism, animism, and alchemy— Gabriele construes an image of Vietri as “an old man alone in a crumbling Roman apartment building, surrounded by hundreds of books not in his native language, frantically researching his own mortality.” Making an accomplished literary debut, notable for its delicate prose and sharply delineated characters, DeRobertis-Theye enmeshes Gabriele in her own frantic search, impelled, at first, by her curiosity about Vietri and the wisdom she imagines he may impart to her. An only child whose mother has been long institutionalized with schizophrenia, Gabriele, on the cusp of turning 25, decides to leave her job, the boyfriend who hopes to marry her, and a life that has become claustrophobic and aimless. Desultory travels finally end in Rome, where her mother was born, where Gabriele had spent summers as a teenager, and where she tries—but fails—to find Vietri at his apartment. Fearful of being caught in the “traumas and histories” of her many Italian relatives, at first she devotes herself solely to investigating Vietri and, as she discovers records and documents, becomes drawn into a larger trauma: Italy’s wartime past. DeRobertis-Theye unfolds Gabriele’s quest like a mystery, revealing clues both to Vietri’s life and Gabriele’s: her fear of inheriting schizophrenia, her overwhelming feelings of grief, her conflicted longing for family, and her obsession with Vietri. “Usually,” a friend tells her, “it’s that you need something about the world explained to you. You want to understand the order of things and you think that if you trace the life of this man it will do that for you.”

A captivating tale.