Via Dolorosa
by Ronald Damien Malfi
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ronald Damien MalfiEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-01-15
ISBN: 1933293217
Number of pages: 268
Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Book Reviews of Via Dolorosa
Book Review: After sorrow comes Malfi
Summary: 5 Stars
When a single cicada lighting on a window creates a climactic tension, compressing all the sorrows of war and relationships into one moment, I know that a novelist has been hard at work, though subtly, from the start. In Via Dolorosa by Ronald Damien Malfi, two children stand at a hotel window, observing the cicada suctioned to the outside, tapping at it when it doesn't move, rattling the panes, and rousing their mother to whisk them away. The cicada remains undisturbed. Malfi gives us one small moment of human curiosity and determination against unflinching nature, and that one moment compresses the horrors of war, the sadness of failed relationships, and the inconsolable sorrow of loss, into the epicenter of the difficult dream that is this novel. From there, what has been smoldering explodes to a final, uneasy release.
Nick D'Nofrio is haunted by his time in Iraq, and the idyllic hotel that is the setting of his honeymoon becomes the heart of guilt and sadness. And Nick isn't alone. A seductive, consuming photographer, who had been brutally raped, films the ruins of the island's storms and tells Nick she wants to photograph the dead children in Iraq, how they're piled in trucks and their "heads turn funny on their necks when they are lifted from the streets." The bell captain wanders the hotel, haunted by his son who died in Iraq under Nick's command, the same ghost who keeps begging Nick to shoot him in the head. Nick's wife follows the call of the limbo contests--how low can you go--watching their marriage disintegrate. A bartender rows out to sea every night in search of his drowned daughter. And the newspapers relate tales of seventeen Chinese divers drowned at sea, while the 17-year cicadas prepare for their island assault.
There is also a jazz musician who remains balanced despite the world around him, balanced under the assault of Isabella's snapshots, as "flashbulbs exploded over and over again, the light briefly igniting Claxton's black skin, over and over making him look like a skeleton." Claxton is a man with the "most unconcerned face" Nick has ever looked upon. Claxton would never find himself in war. In that he resembles the natural world around them. And it's with the natural world that the novel begins.
The setting in Via Dolorosa nearly tells the story throughout, from the rolling slopes of lawns and the verandas shaded with sweeping palms, to the onslaught of the storm that strips "the magnolias bare" and "pounds the sand and the roiling sea," to the desolate, desert landscape of Iraq that haunts Nick and obscenely materializes in the idyllic mural he was hired to paint. The reader gets their first view of the story from the outside looking in, rather than from the character looking out. But rather than create a cold distance from its characters, the effect is all-encompassing, a view of life from the largest perspectives first--from nature and time and how things move in the world, then moving closer to the immediate outskirts of this story (in small things like insecticides being sprayed, which implies by other people who have other complete lives), then finally up close with the characters of this particular tale. For me, this is how the author keeps the world always in sight and moves the reader beyond the broken specks of glass that reflect our immediate lives.
Via Dolorosa is a multi-layered, rich novel that holds the reader firm on a sorrowful journey, but instead of leaving me desolate, I'm oddly consoled. Because somehow the landscape of this author's vision makes me see past the mistakes and the horrors of humanity, see something within reach, maybe something in nature's constant rejuvenation and people's constant need to create and their longing to forgive and be forgiven. I suggest taking this path; step into Via Dolorosa and let it take you.
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