In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
By Joseph Luzzi
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
When you lose your whole world in a moment, where do you turn?
On a cold November morning, Joseph Luzzi, a Dante scholar and professor at Bard College, found himself racing to the hospital—his wife, Katherine, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car accident. In one terrible instant, Luzzi became both a widower and a first-time father.
In the aftermath of unthinkable tragedy, Luzzi relied on the support of his Italian immigrant family, returning to his childhood home to grieve and care for his infant daughter. But it wasn't until he turned to The Divine Comedy—a poem he had devoted his life to studying and teaching—that he learned how to resurrect his life. Following the same structure as Dante's epic poem, Luzzi is shepherded out of his own "dark wood," passing through the grief-stricken Inferno, the Purgatory of healing, and ultimately stepping into the Paradise of rediscovered love.
Beautifully written, poignant, insightful, and unflinchingly honest, In a Dark Wood is a hybrid of heartrending memoir and a meditation on the power of great art to give us strength in our darkest moments. Drawing us into hell and back, it is Dante's journey, Joseph Luzzi's, and our very own.
Joseph Luzzi
Joseph Luzzi is Associate Professor of Italian and Director of Italian Studies at Bard College, USA, and the author of Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (2008), which received the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice (2009).
Read more from Joseph Luzzi
In a Dark Wood: A Memoir Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My Two Italies: A Personal and Cultural History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related to In a Dark Wood
Related ebooks
How to Go to Heaven for Teen Girls: How to Go to Heaven: A Must-Read Series for all Christians Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Many Days: Selected Poems of Norman McCaig Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Early Childhood Memories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsR.A.K. Mason: Collected Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Shropshire Lad Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMississippi Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Seed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ghost Horse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dream of Gerontius, Set to Music (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThais Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Forever Street: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Barks and Purrs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGetting on Toward Home: And Other Sermons by the River Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sleet: Selected Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDreading and Hoping All Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSolving for X: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Art Fair: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The History Boys: The Film Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Town Smokes and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHoney Don't Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Rear-View Mirrors Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEunoia: The Upgraded Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai a Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Comedienne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHologram: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hosts and Guests: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Personal Memoirs For You
The Glass Castle: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Choice: Embrace the Possible Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Diary of a Young Girl Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Stash: My Life in Hiding Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm Glad My Mom Died Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Stolen Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yes Please Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Child Called It: One Child's Courage to Survive Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dry: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mediocre Monk: A Stumbling Search for Answers in a Forest Monastery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Solutions and Other Problems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: the heartfelt, funny memoir by a New York Times bestselling therapist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Whiskey in a Teacup: What Growing Up in the South Taught Me About Life, Love, and Baking Biscuits Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bad Mormon: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dad on Pills: Fatherhood and Mental Illness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for In a Dark Wood
14 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Books teach us many things. The best books and stories reflect the human condition, helping us understand how to face any number of situations we encounter in our lives. They show us what is possible, both good and bad. And although we may hope to never feel the need to look to certain works for guidance, they are still available to us if we need them. To read books is to live many lives, some truly and some vicariously. But what happens when you are forced to lead a life you didn't want and didn't choose, one that threatened to pull you under? When Dante scholar and professor Joseph Luzzi loses his wife in a car accident the same day his daughter is born, he is thrust into a life he doesn't want to lead, lost and wandering without any map. His memoir, In a Dark Wood, recounts the years he spent learning to find his way out of grief and mourning, finally learning to be a father and to love again, thanks to close a close reading of Dante's Divine Comedy. Luzzi's wife Katherine was eight and a half months pregnant when she was hit and killed in an automobile accident. Although doctors could not save her life, they could save the baby, delivering tiny Isabel by emergency caesarean. Luzzi had been looking forward to becoming a father, despite the fact that his own father did not give him a model he wanted to follow in his own parenting. But when he loses Katherine, he is too overcome with grief to take care of Isabel, giving her over to the care of his old-world Calabrian mother and sisters, plunging himself into work to distract himself from the pain of loss. Luckily his work is on Dante, author of one of history's most famous lost love's laments and ultimately a guide to helping Luzzi come to terms with his unwanted and unlooked for vita nuova (new life). The deeply personal memoir of loss, grief, and longing is intricately intertwined with Luzzi's literary exploration of Dante, especially as Dante's loss of his beloved Beatrice mirrored Luzzi's own journey through his loss of Katherine and the exile he feels from his own life. Dante's journey through the underworld, purgatory, and ultimately into paradise, is mirrored by Luzzi's years of struggle to come out the other side of his own dark wood of deep and paralyzing grief. He looked to Dante to help him understand how it is possible to still love someone who has become incorporeal, gone from this world forever. Luzzi finds some solace in the parallels he finds in Dante but the book cannot show him how to be a father. From the very beginning, he has an inability to connect with Isabel because of being emotionally frozen to protect against the overwhelming agony that his wife's death carries for him. And in Katherine's absence as Isabel's flesh and blood mother, Luzzi does not know how he should father this baby, this toddler, this child either. As he addresses his own despair, he pulls directly from Dante's writing and life experiences, weaving the literary and the personal tightly together. His own life is an illustration of Dante's journey. Or perhaps Dante's journey is an illustration of Luzzi's life. His writing about his own life is raw but the literary analysis, while reinforcing the shared experience, helps make the emotion a little less overwhelming to the reader. Luzzi spares nothing in opening up about his loneliness and his floundering as a father. He is honest about the failures at moving on in his life, wanting to replicate the family that was forever lost with Katherine's death, one that truly perhaps never quite existed in the first place. But Dante doesn't just teach him about death, pushing him to the purgatory of healing and the paradise of love as well. As Luzzi says, "every grief story is a love story" and this is certainly that. It's a wrenching tale skillfully told, literate and accessible both.