August 2010 Archives
Marilynne Robinson Discusses Gilead on NPR
Central NY Readers Guild on Dark Water
A Review of Robert Clark’s Dark Water
for the IAM Reader’s Guild – July 2010
By Tamara J. Murphy
Four years ago in June, a whirry Chinook air-lifted the six members of my family and our spotted Jack Russell Terrier off the football field in the center of our town to the safe and dry hills above our valley, above the chugging river waters invading the homes and businesses of our little community. Our home, sitting fortuitously on an almost invisible topographical rise, was dry like a mown oasis on the shore of brown seepage.
The experience formed the grid for my reading of Robert Clark’s historical primer on the -floods in Florence. It is the middle of summer, after all, Clark’s 324 pages can not exactly be classified as a “beach read”, and only two of us in the Endicott guild read the book. We still met, but around my family dinner table, instead. Since my husband and children shared the same remembrance of the sweaty labor of mucking out a town, I figured they’d be willing to listen to our summary of the book. We garnered their attention by retelling the personal vignettes of the flood victims: Azelide doomed in her wheelchair and the heroic Father Boretti, Father Cocci and the floating monks. Another hot topic around the dinner table? Conspiracy theories and slow media coverage. The suburban river valley of Conklin, NY had the same complaints in 2006 as the erudite Florentines on the banks of the Arno River. Unlike Florence, we had a town supervisor who won awards for her response to the sepia-colored stench covering her town.
The topic with the most response, but the least amount of conversation? In floodwaters, do you save a life or a priceless work of art? No questions here. One son tried to help the rest of us see the full picture, “One work of art from a master could equal the stories of many lives.” Didn’t matter. We agreed no piece of art was worth that of even the littlest Marina Ripari, God rest her soul.
Over grilled chicken and spinach salad cut fresh from the garden, the family quizzed us. Would you read more of this kind of writing? Perhaps our metaphors were influenced by the setting, “I wouldn’t make a steady diet of it, no.” The truth is that Clark has done the world an invaluable favor, chronicling the bad deeds of the Arno River. The heroic and painstaking rescue of the literature and paintings belonging to the history of Men. But as a personal read? It seemed that the flood of information surrounding the 1965 disaster in Florence overwhelmed the author and, occasionally, left us – his readers – to muck out his intentions. Was it a history of a people? A threatened era? A literary wreath of valor to the decades-long work of art restoration crews? An attempt to champion the lesser known Masters of the Renaissance? The author’s intentions seemed to meander a bit around the curves and bends of so many points of view, leaving this reader floating up the river about 100 pages back.
Still, I am glad to know the soggy story of Florence. During the week I was reading the book, I happened to overhear a conversation between my parents about the day that JFK was shot. Their memories intensified in the telling. I asked them, “Do you remember the news of the flooding in Florence a couple of years later?”
“Florence, Italy?”
For no other reason, Robert Clark has done a good service to humanity.
Readers Guild
The IAM Readers Guild 2010 blog.