How Fires End

Abstract

Fear the curses of Sicilian saints. They will follow you across the ocean. This is a core belief of the Sicilian-American community at the center of Marco Rafalà’s novel, How Fires End. The legend of St. Sebastian is at the source of Rafalà’s story of grief and migration, devotion and betrayal, of what it means still to inhabit Sicily while living in America. Rafalà’s artfully constructed novel draws us into an immigrant community haunted by multiple losses, some recent, others distant in time, as well as geography, but not any less raw. Indeed, the losses that occurred in Sicily represent the matrix of all losses that follow.Legend has it that St. Sebastian found his way to Sicily in 1414, when a ship coming from the Adriatic sank near the island of Magnisi. No one died, and that miraculous event was attributed to the presence of the statue of St. Sebastian on the ship. The willful saint designated his home by making his statue too heavy to be carried by anyone except the people of the town of Melilli. This is the pretext for the plot of a novel where myth/religion, folklore, and history find a perfect balance as the terrain for the lives of three generations of Sicilians and Sicilian Americans.In How Fires End, the reverberations of history reach us through the microhistories of the unknown, the unrecognized, the marginal. While chronologically the plot begins to unravel in Sicily during World War II, with the invasion/liberation of the Allied Forces, and continues with post–World War II migration to the United States, the novel opens in 1980s Connecticut. A teenage boy struggles to find his identity as a second-generation Sicilian American while trying to make sense of his simultaneously tightly knit and excruciatingly divided community. The premature loss of his American mother who taught him to love the stars has not only left him motherless, but it has also made him somewhat fatherless as that loss has amplified and deepened his father's old wounds. The depiction of the relationship between father and son—their disconnection, their silent yearning for love, the solitary grief each nurtures—is brilliantly executed, with the precise strokes of a student of Sicilian masculinity in its multiple, nuanced manifestations across time and place.Few American novels have captured Sicilian male characters with the emotional complexity and authenticity of Rafalà’s stunning debut novel. And few boy characters have moved me as deeply as David, the protagonist and narrator of the first part. I so loved this small giant that the conclusion of the first part left me bereft. I was also baffled as to what the author would do with the rest of the novel—David had been central, not only as a character but as the novel's narrator. But Rafalà masterfully shifts our perspective—of narration, character, time, place, and story. At the same time, he deftly assembles the pieces of the puzzle that constitute his epic narrative in a manner that feels as inevitable as it is necessary to highlight the web of ties interlacing the characters and their stories, in Sicily and in the United States.Rafalà’s novel finds its place in a literary tradition of Italian American intergenerational narratives that includes Helen Barolini's Umbertina, Louise DeSalvo's Crazy in the Kitchen, Tina De Rosa's Paper Fish, Joanna Clapps Herman's The Anarchist Bastard, Kym Ragusa's The Skin between Us, Karen Tintori's Unto the Daughters, and Juliet Grames's The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna, among others. How Fires End testifies not only to the vitality of the genre but also to the persistence of the issues of cross-generational memory and trauma that feed the soul of Italian American writing.