Dear Reader,

Five years ago, when my first novel came out, a barrier existed between author and reader. Certainly, I received emails—wonderful emails—but I took a while to answer them, I neglected a few, and for the most part, I was overwhelmed to hear so directly from people who had spent so many patient hours inhabiting a fictional world I had created.

Do you remember a cheesy old movie called “The Boy In the Bubble?” Thanks to Google, I just looked it up. Yep, 1982, John Travolta. Wow. I can laugh now, but I remember how that movie captivated me. I was fascinated and horrified by the sense of a person cut off from the physical world, and the idea that he might just die suddenly if the barrier was breached, and the notion that in some cases, that risk would be worth taking. Who wants to stay in a bubble?

Email, Facebook, instantly downloadable ebooks, online reader reviews, instant sales metrics and more have breached the author-reader barrier. Now, authors are expected to communicate more directly with their readers. At the very least, readers have gained power, able to talk back instantly, to enter a cultural conversation that was once open only to professional reviewers and the editorial mandates of a limited number of venues.  

For an author, it’s a little scary at first. What if a writer gets sucked into interacting too often, compromising time for writing? (It certainly happens.) What if readers insist on making off-point comments in their reviews? What if readers are unfair? Whose book is this, anyway?

The truth is: it’s the reader’s book. The author had her chance—two years, or five. The editor had her chance as well. But now, like a teenager leaving the nest, insisting upon independence and individuation, the book shakes off its previous ownership and steps out into the wider world.

Occasionally, I’ve disagreed with or winced at remarks from readers and reviewers. But more often, I’ve enjoyed reading some really well-written summaries and analyses of my novels. Nearly always, there are surprises: readers liking and responding to things that I, the author, wasn’t so sure readers would like, or taking away a different message from the one I intended. Or the one reader in twenty who is particularly critical, but in a way that makes me think, “I agree!” – not that I want to add any ammunition. Or the readers who gravitate to a certain character, not the one I expected. Or the readers who assume I’m a man, or European, or much older, based on what I’ve written. Or the reader who finds some very nifty symbolism that I didn’t intend. (I’m willing to accept credit, of course.) Or the reader or interviewer who digresses from my plotline into a larger philosophical or historical question or argument and I think: Yes, go there. I’m thrilled to hear how this relates to something else happening in the real world, especially if it’s something you’ve personally experienced.  

Perhaps I’m supposed to stay in my bubble, but frankly, I find these comments and reviews and conversations more interesting and encouraging than not. Do I prefer five-star reviews over three- or four-star reviews that argue or quibble? Actually, I like them both. What encourages me most is the idea that people are taking the time, not only to read, but to respond, to recommend, to talk back, to advocate or disagree, to grab a book and give it a good shake, to make it their own.

Whether we meet elsewhere, at a book event or online, I’m glad you stopped by. I look forward to hearing or reading your side of the conversation, whether it’s about a book I’ve written, or about books in general.

Andromeda

Leonardo as Ernst, Paul as Pablo: Hollywood dreaming

OK, twist my arm. Make me consider which actors I wish would play my fictional characters. Marshal Zeringue of the website “My Book, the Movie” asked me to do just that and it took me, oh, about five minutes to comply.

For Feliu, the main character in my first novel The Spanish Bow (originally inspired by Pau a.k.a. Pablo Casals), I chose Paul Giamatti. And why wouldn’t my favorite actor, star of “Sideways” and the John Adams series, not want to play a Catalan cellist? Picture this man holding a cello bow and flirting, however inexpertly, with the Queen of Spain.

For Ernst Vogler, the 24-year-old (and later 34-year-old) narrator of The Detour, I’m plugging for Leonardo DiCaprio. I know– everyone wants Leonardo– but I think there’s something extra cool and coincidental about the fact that DiCaprio is both Bavarian and Italian, and that he first kicked (inside his Mamma’s belly) while she was touring an art museum. Miracolo!

Nice Booklist Review! “A Metaphor for Life…”

Set against the background of impending war and Nazi reprisals, Romano-Lax’s delicately atmospheric journey of discovery is, of course, a metaphor for life, with all its unaccountable and uncontrollable diversions and demands. A gently haunting work of subtle and surprising wisdom.— Carol Haggas, Booklist, Feb. 1.

Why I wrote The Detour (a pub day post)

Several years ago, I came across a photograph of a classical statue called the Discus Thrower, a Roman copy of an even earlier ancient Greek marble. I read, in a minor footnote, that Hitler insisted on buying it from Italy in 1938, against the objections of some Italians. Why, I wanted to know, was Hitler obsessed with this particular work of art? What was he seeing in it that I couldn’t immediately fathom? Why would this image matter so much at this time, on the eve of war? As soon as I’d imagined that question, a character began to take shape: not Hitler, the infamous failed painter and art thief, but an unknown and apolitical underling named Ernst Vogler, whose job would be to go to Rome, pick up the statue, and escort it home to Munich, along Italian back roads. I knew from the beginning that much would go wrong, but that the journey itself would change Ernst’s life. I hope that readers will come away with a strong sense of that ethically difficult time period and their own questions about the role of art, the complications of history, and the way our intensely personal lives intersect with larger, uncontrollable events.

Photo: The author’s children sketch the ancient Discus Thrower statue on a family trip to Rome.

In Time for Valentine’s Day: A love letter to E.M. Forster and literary Italy

The other day I picked up a century-old novel about which I’d completely forgotten and it struck me that it contained a theme about which many authors – myself included— have written: the romantic, transformational allure of Italy. Bursting with art and history, blessed with warmth and beauty and busty women crying out, “Mangia, mangia,” Italy is an everflowing source not only of romance, but of one particular idea about romance: the idea that traveling to a new place is the best possible way to leave timidity and stodginess behind. To go to Italy even briefly, some of our favorite books tell us, is to have a chance at becoming a new, more passionate person.

No wonder then, that Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert made it her first stop on a global search for the better life. Of course, she found love later in the trip. In Italy, she only gained weight. But that first exercise in indulging the appetite is more than a simple metaphor for becoming ready for love. It seems, in Italy anyway, like a very real and necessary preamble. How can one find passion while counting calories? Why not have seconds, and another glass of wine? Why not, indeed.

It’s no surprise that Gilbert’s mega-bestseller would attract criticism, though, including the barb that it is naïve to expect so much pleasure, love, and enlightenment all from a simple trip. But that’s exactly what travelers have expected—and in cases beyond even Gilbert’s, what they have sometimes found. Six years before Eat Pray Love, Laura Fraser authored another book in the “rebound and find love in Italy” subgenre with her 2001 memoir, An Italian Affair. Fraser, abandoned by her husband, heads off to Italy, and has a tryst with a professor from Paris, which in turn becomes a truly global love romp. Like Gilbert, Fraser gets to have her cake and eat it too, finding a partner who appreciates her plump curves, labeling them “sportif.” Hotel bedroom scenes are woven with descriptions of grilled eggplant, lemon-sauteed sole, tomatoes and bruschetta. Most memorable in An Italian Affair is the use, for the entire length of the memoir, of the second person. Fraser writes her memoir as if it is happening to you. It’s a bold choice, but Italy is bold. Take it or leave it.

Skipping past an assortment of late twentieth century renovation memoirs about falling in love with Italian real estate, I’m going to switch now from memoir to fiction, from female authors to a male one. A Room With A View by E.M Forster tells the funny and charming story of a young couple breaking free of their repressive, British, middle-class chains and falling in love while on Italian holiday. This novel was made into a classic Merchant Ivory film starring Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy, charmingly upset by a sudden kiss on a violet-covered Tuscan slope. Violets—and vistas— can do that, we’re told.

But there is another Forster novel that explores the Italian theme as well. The one I had entirely forgotten about—and am glad to have rediscovered—was published three years before A Room With a View, in 1905. Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread tells a similar story of Britons enchanted and transformed by lands to the south. Here on the very first page is Philip, one of the upright (and uptight) main characters, waxing both romantically and imperiously about Italy to his sister-in-law Lilia, whose train to Tuscany is just about to pull away: “ ‘Remember,’ he concluded, ‘that it is only by going off the track that you get to know the country. See the little towns—Gubbio, Pienza, Cortona, San Gemignano, Monteriano. And don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land.’ ”

When I read this line the other day, I realized, with both pleasure and puzzlement, that it reminded me of a small speech I’d written into my own new novel.

In The Detour, to be published on Valentine’s Day, an apolitical art expert named Gerhard, who is working for the Nazis in 1938 Munich, counsels his protégée, as the younger man recalls: “(Gerhard) had begun to revive his own memories of that fabled, sunny country: The hill towns and piazzas. The ruins and vistas. The frescoes and fountains. And a certain woman he had met somewhere—I think it was a town called Perugia, or maybe Pisa. The relationship lasted no more than a few days but had meant the world to him, and I had been bold enough in my naïve youth to ask, ‘But how can something like that matter if it only lasted a few days?’”

The fact that the younger Bavarian, every bit as uptight as a Forster character, can’t imagine what can happen in a few days proves his mentor’s point. Young Ernst Vogler needs a dose of Italy more than anyone. In The Detour, he gets it.

As Forster realized, the only problem with the transformational-power-of-Italy theme is that we still bring our old selves with us on any journey. Violets and vistas, bruschetta and buxom ladies, and still—it’s so hard to abandon the British stiff upper lip or the German preference for order. Yet, it’s such fun to watch characters—and ourselves—yearn to be more than we were back home.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you. And don’t forget: Mangia! Mangia!

A new review for The Detour from Library Journal

In 1938, Ernst Vogler is sent to Italy by the German government to bring back for Hitler a famous ancient statue, Myron’s The Discus Thrower. Vogler is a sad case. Afraid to speak up about what is happening in Germany, he falls back on obedience to orders as a lifeline; his passion for art is only “a substitution for other losses.” Sneaking out of Rome with the statue tucked safely in back of a truck, Vogler is accompanied by two Italian brothers, both policemen. They have three days to reach the German border. But time has its own logic in Italy, and one brother has his own agenda. There are betrayals. People die. Vogler’s schedule is thrown to the winds. Then, unexpectedly, Vogler is given the gift of love with a beautiful and passionate woman in the lush countryside of Piedmont.

VERDICT: Romano-Lax is singularly gifted: she creates full-fledged, engaging characters and writes compelling narrative. Some of her descriptive passages take your breath away. The author’s The Spanish Bow was a hit. This novel will make a splash, too, for the same reasons.

[See Prepub Alert, 8/21/11.]—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

A Family Trip to Italy, with Tips

Romano-Lax family in front of Rome's Trevi Fountain

In my second novel, The Detour, young German art lover Ernst Vogler is unsatisfied with knowing his favorite classical statue, The Discus Thrower, only through photographs. Only by seeing this ancient work of art in person will he come to know more about the statue’s value and what it has to say to him about physical beauty and the ultimate meaning of art.

Like any person inclined to travel, I, too, love to see works of art, historic buildings, and landscapes in person. No amount of library research can compete with an afternoon walking through the streets of Rome—that chaotic city of ancient ruins and fountains and plazas buzzing with people, cars, and scooters.  Or an evening in Tuscany or the Piedmont, walking past vineyards, and grocery shopping for cheeses, fruit, and wine.  

Every book I’ve written has required travel of some kind, and I’ve always brought along my husband and children: to Puerto Rico, France, and Spain for my first novel, and to Italy and Germany for my second. During our Italy trip, my son was 15, and my daughter  was 11. My son is an art aficionado who always travels with a sketchbook, so he couldn’t get enough of museums, usually lingering in each gallery long after my feet were begging for a break. My daughter, on the other hand, suffers from premature museum exhaustion. For her, a better experience than any museum was being set free at dawn in a Roman farmer’s market, with a handful of coins and an assignment to bargain for strawberries using the few words of Italian she’d learned. Some souvenir shopping, a gelato at the Piazza Navona, and a visit to the Trevi Fountain is more her style.

At our next stop, in Tuscany, all of us loved staying for a week just outside Florence in a compound of medieval, stone-walled apartments still owned by the Machiavelli family. (We brought two copies of The Prince along­—the regular version, and a graphic novel treatment that also covered Renaissance politics and philosophy.) Later, we headed northwest to the Piedmont, a place suggested by my husband, who had starting reading about that region’s wine and truffles, and found us an out-of-the-way bed and breakfast in a quiet valley. If not for his early interest, the last third of my novel might have taken place in another out-of-the-way region, like Umbria or Lombardy.

If I were sharing advice with other travelers, especially traveling families, I’d suggest:

Prepare. With our kids, we watched several historical documentaries about the ancient Romans (Caesars and gladiators aplenty), and about artists like Caravaggio, Bernini, and Michelangelo. Those stories made our later walks through Rome and Florence come alive. 

Rent apartments, cottages, or villas; there are endless options online. We’ve done this in many foreign countries and haven’t stumbled into a bad deal yet. For a short while, you feel like a local. Having more hangout space than a hotel room makes for easier afternoons and evenings with children (or any small group) and less pressure to pack the day with formal sightseeing. You can cook your own food, which in Italy, is great fun, because it gives your day some structure. Walk to the local market, sample food and practice your Italian, walk home and cook. The simplest homemade pizza and pasta is astounding, using authentic Italian cheese, meat or seafood, tomatoes, and basil.

Seek out some of the lesser-known museums. The Uffizi in Florence is famous for good reason, and Rome’s National Museum has lots to see. But our favorite museum was the smaller Museo e Galleria Borghese in Rome. Housed in a sumptuous 17^th century villa surrounded by an urban park, the collection includes statues by Bernini, paintings by Caravaggio, ancient mosaics and more. Reservations are required, and visitors are allowed two hours to see the collection, but this planning requirement—a little intimidating at first—reduces crowds and makes the visit more worthwhile, especially for kids who are tired of feeling trampled.

The author with family, at a Piedmont B&B, making homemade pasta

Take a cooking class. We found ours in an affordable bed-and-breakfast in the Piedmont. Our host couple spent a long evening with us, allowing all four of us to help make two kinds of homemade pasta, one of them filled with squash, and a cheesy mushroom risotto that took hours (and which I’ve never managed to duplicate perfectly at home). At the dinner itself, also attended by other B&B guests, we tasted about seven wines and liqueurs, most of them made by the lodge owner. This class and included meal cost no more than forgettable restaurant meals in Rome and Tuscany. 

Indulge your touristy side, too. Our original trip plan was Rome, Tuscany, and Piedmont. Our 11-year-old daughter really wanted to see Venice. (I’d seen it years before, and remembered it as beautiful but a little kitschy.) Luckily, we let her talk us into it. We stayed just outside Venice to reduce the cost, and took public transportation into the city of canals. Seen through my daughter’s eyes, it was completely magical. Most of our time was spent riding around on the vaporettos (water taxis), including at night, when the canals are all lit up. We didn’t hit any major attractions­—we just wandered, people-watched, and did a little sketching, painting, and journaling on the side. To this day, my daughter reminds us of what an amazing two days it was.

Art, Power, and Responsibility: Harlan — a great documentary elevated by empathy and nuance

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss, a documentary by Felix Moeller, available now on Netflix.

You’re a top German director with an adorable young starlet of a wife (think Reese Witherspoon with chubbier cheeks), as well as a taste for romantic melodrama, and you’re asked by the Minister of Propaganda to make a dramatic feature with an anti-Semitic theme.  Do you walk away, knowing that future film funding will be difficult to acquire? Do you go ahead and make it, but do a lousy job on purpose? Do you make it the best movie you can, because you’re driven as an artist and believe it’s possible to keep politics out of the equation? After all, even Shakespeare commited an act of anti-Semitic caricature, in the person of Shylock; are artists bound to moral choices, or are they commited only to self-expression?  

And what do you do in the years that follow, when you are one of the few artists charged and later acquitted for having committed a crime against humanity, but the world seems convinced of your culpability?

Many of these same questions about art, propaganda, and personal responsibility inspired my novels, The Spanish Bow and The Detour. No wonder, then, that I was so swept up by this true story, told with great intelligence, empathy, nuance and sensitivity, by German documentarian Felix Moeller. Until recently, I’d never heard of Moeller or his subject, Veit Harlan, but I was so impressed with this film that I’m recommending it to anyone who shares my interest in the time period and in artistic/ethical dilemmas in general. Beyond those issues, it’s simply a great film about family. The reverberations of one man’s career choices are shown in the lives of his children and grandchildren, who have struggled under the Harlan legacy.    

Harlan — The Shadow of Jew Suss (2008; distributed in the U.S. in 2010; I found it on Netflix this week thanks to my mother-in-law’s recommendation) tells the story of the Third Reich’s most popular — and now, mostly forgotten — movie maker. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was actually more famous than Leni Riefenstahl, another documentarian who was taking cues from Minister Goebbels. 

Veit Harlan made romantic tear-jerkers seen by tens of millions of Europeans, including “Jew Suss,” a crude anti-Semitic film that was required viewing for the SS. It’s been banned in Germany for years, and some members of Harlan’s own family hadn’t seen the film until recently, but its reputation cast a shadow over several generations. It’s the time given to these family member’s reactions that makes this documentary stand out. Two children of Harlan’s ended up marrying Jewish spouses (neither marriage succeeded). One of these daughters converted to Judaism and later committed suicide. One son became an environmentalist, seeking redemption in anti-nuclear activism. Another son became an exceptionally forthright filmmaker, speaking out against his father’s own ethical missteps– a public stance that at least a few other family members frown upon. The three granddaughters shown in the film are mostly baffled by how cheesy and banal Harlan’s notorious “Jew Suss” film was. The youngest generation seems to reject personal guilt by association, but they do embrace responsibility — at least in the form of remembering and continuing the dialogue about art, propaganda, and the consequences of our actions. I think all of the family members were incredibly brave to appear in this documentary. They’ve done a great service by being candid and thoughtful, resisting platitudes, vitriol,  defensiveness or easy answers. And I greatly admire Felix Moeller for giving voice to so many shades of interpretation, which continue after the documentary’s end in several post-film interviews. If only most of us were willing to think and speak so openly about the collision of personal and public history, including the dark and irreconcilable parts.

The Discus Thrower: a forgotten symbol from my own family’s German-American past

The original idea for my second novel, The Detour, was sparked by seeing a photograph of the ancient Greco-Roman Discus Thrower statue, and a footnote explaining that Hitler was obsessed with the work and insisted upon buying it, against the objections of many Italians, in 1938. (I wanted to know why Hitler wanted it so badly, what he was seeing in the statue that I couldn’t fathom at first, and why this would have significance on the eve of World War II.)

That’s the novel’s trigger, but it’s not everything. After the novel was finished, I started asking myself about what in my own background made me so curious about athletic symbols, German culture, and the idea of physical perfection in the first place.

I am descended from German and Italian ancestors, and I married into a Jewish family that includes relatives who barely escaped the Holocaust—as well as some who didn’t. All of those facts inform this novel and my own thematic and philosophical concerns.

But if I can take just one side of that family story today: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my maternal grandfather, John Cress, German-American (among other mixed ethnicities), a high school gymnastics and springboard diving coach well-known in the Chicagoland area. He was part of one of the nation’s earliest college gymnastics teams, at the University of Illinois, in the 1930s, when the sport was not particularly well-known. Later, he introduced some of the first gymnastic programs to several high schools. A gymnastics invitational is named after him, and he was inducted into the Illinois Gymnastics Hall of Fame. But he was also a student of history, a member of the military, and a former vaudevillian who performed gymnastic tricks of agility, strength, and grace at fairs and circuses. My mother and aunt were raised performing athletic stunts and visiting the German-American “Turner Halls”—community centers with a strong fitness component that really launched the idea of physical education in America.

My grandfather­—“Papa Coach,” as everyone knew him—instilled all of us with that classic German concept, “Sound mind, sound body.” He did everything he could to promote our participation in sports. This is the positive side of the German (and Ancient Greek) obsession with the ideal, physical human form. The corruption of that idea– which my grandfather and his fellow Turners did not support– is the Nazi obsession with genetics, a false idea about the perfection of the Aryan race.

In his 70s, my grandfather was hospitalized after a cycling accident in which he was training on the icy track of an outdoor velodrome, getting ready for sprinting races. When the doctor found out how he’d fallen­ and broken his hip—at that age—he was astounded.

When I look at the Discus Thrower statue, I see Mediterranean features that in some way resemble my own, a balanced muscular physique that resembled my grandfather’s, and an idea, in an extreme and corrupted form, which came close to wiping out my husband’s family. Every good idea, taken too far, can become grotesque.

If my grandfather were alive today, he might or might not see how he helped inspire this novel. Only today, when I went searching for a graphic to accompany this post, did I discover that the logo for the German-American Turner Society, of which he was proud, is the central image and object of The Detour: a discus thrower.

On Names: an interview in parts, with author Andromeda Romano-Lax

Names seem to matter a lot in your books. The narrator of your first novel, The Spanish Bow, was named Feliu, a name that almost means happy (Feliz). The narrator in your forthcoming novel, The Detour, is named Ernst.

Yes, Ernst, which sounds an awful lot like earnest. Which he is­­—often to a fault. As the narrator himself also reveals, it also means “willing to battle to the death,” which he is not. Ernst is like most of us: he really just wants to live. In 1938, that meant keeping a low profile, trying not to anger his superiors, or be targeted by army bullies, or raise any alarms. But by trying so hard to live, he doesn’t live at all. And he knows—as he witnesses the disappearance of his mentor, and even as he experiences the joyless affection of another self-servingly cautious co-worker, a Munich secretary­—that this way of living isn’t living. What he experiences in Italy is something altogether different. Through his road adventure with Cosimo and Enzo, but most of all by meeting their sister Rosina, he experiences spontaneity, friendship, pleasure, and a little terror, too. As well as new views, bluer skies, food and family and hospitality and (am I giving away too much?) some unbridled sensuality. Flesh, instead of marble. It breaks him out of his paralysis. It awakens something real in him—something that will end up sustaining him long after the Italian trip, which is a good thing, given that the clouds of war are on the horizon. 

As for his last name, Vogler: Originally, I did not pick it for any intentional meaning (it means simply “fowler” or “bird catcher” in German). But reflecting on it now, it does sound like “vulgar,” a word that now means indecent, but used to have no negative connation. It once meant simply “common.” And Ernst is a common man: not fully heroic. It is perhaps too much to expect perfect heroism of most people who happened to be entering adulthood just as the Nazis came to power. What is amazing is that some people did manage to have integrity and skepticism about the Nazi project. Ernst’s mentor, Gerhard, whom we meet only briefly, is one of those men.

As for Enzo (short for Lorenzo) and Cosimo: these are common Italian names, which happen to correspond to famous members of the Medici political dynasty, a Renaissance family known for their patronage of art.

And your name?

Ah yes. Writing The Detour­—a novel about a Roman copy of a Greek statue purchased by a tyrant who is intent both on destroying the Jews and acquiring all of the Europe’s finest art (among many despicable plans), I realized I would never come up with a novel that better matches my own name and my own heritage, both by birth and marriage—as well as my own thematic and philosophical concerns. “Andromeda” is from Greek mythology, “Romano” means from Rome, “Lax” is Jewish—and all those cultures and heritages are bound up with the central issues of the story. It’s a strange convergence, and it helped me to feel that I was telling a story I was meant to tell—whether it was ever published or read. I wrote it to explore my own passions and questions, to follow the road from Rome, and to see where that road led.