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    In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
    Unavailable
    In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
    Unavailable
    In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
    Audiobook7 hours

    In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love

    Written by Joseph Luzzi

    Narrated by Rick Adamson

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A story of love and grief. ‘I became a widower and a father on the same day’ says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.

    Where do we turn when we lose everything?

    In 2007, Joseph Luzzi’s wife Katherine was eight-and-a-half
    months pregnant when she was involved in a fatal car accident.
    Their daughter, Isabel, was delivered by emergency C-section
    and somehow survived, even while her mother could not. In
    the days when his life changed irrevocably and the years of heartache that followed, Luzzi turned to a man who had been
    an unassuming part of his life since college: Dante.

    A memoir of grief and healing divided into three parts, the book trace’s Luzzi’s journey through Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’
    and his journey through a world without Katherine. The first part, “The Underworld,” follows Luzzi’s descent into grief and his examination of Dante’s accounts of early exile. In the second, “Purgatorio”, Luzzi explores how Dante found the will to carry on and how he himself began to find hidden opportunities in everyday life. The last part is called “Squaring the Circle,”
    referring to Dante’s metaphor for coming face-to-face
    with God and the mysteries of love; in it, Luzzi shares his gratitude towards family members who set aside their lives in his time of need, as well as his experience of meeting the woman who would become his wife and mother to his daughter.

    Luzzi tells his story of personal loss and digs deeper into Dante almost simultaneously, allowing the poet to guide his thinking and forging connections between life in the Inferno and the long life of grief. His memoir is both a personal odyssey and a reminder of the power of great literature in the darkest of times.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJun 4, 2015
    ISBN9780008100650
    Author

    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).

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    Reviews for In a Dark Wood

    3.5/5

    12 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Rather an odd book - I was unable to summon up any empathy at all for the principal character, though the strength of the story was sufficient to keep me reading to the end. Not up to Amanda Craig's best, but still worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Books 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.