Nick DiChario's modern Italian folk tales

philebersole

Jun 30

GIOVANNI'S TREE: New Italian Folktales by Nicholas A. DiChario (2023)

I've been looking forward to reading this book, and I read it with great enjoyment. Nick is a wonderful storyteller, and there's something about his prose style - his word choices, his metaphors, his ironic wit, his compassionate sense of the weaknesses of human nature - that makes his stories a pleasure to re-read.

All nine stories are set in the fictional Sicilian il Villaggio delle Ombre (Villlage of Shadows). They span history from pre-Roman times to the present day.

The village is sheltered by a magic tree, which was fertilized by fine wine and offers protection from the ravages of time. It is inhabited by an immortal witch named Brunilda. She will give you anything you ask, for a price, but her clients find that what they asked for was not what they wanted, and the price was harder to pay than they figured on.

Other inhabitants include a devil, a wood sprite, a zombie, a sentient sweater, a World War One soldier in suspended animation in a block of ice, a baron's beautiful daughter who is immune to the law of gravitation, and a giant well-groomed female rat who is manager of the local branch of an Internet company.

Nick is known as a science fiction writer, and his stories are published in science fiction magazines and other science fiction venues, but his stories are different from the fantasy fiction you'd typically find in the science fiction section of chain bookstores.

When science fiction writers venture into fantasy, they usually treat the supernatural as something with predictable laws, analogous to chemistry and physics, as in the Harold Shea stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt.

Nick DiChario's stories are nothing like that. They are like the traditional folk tales, in which the supernatural is awe-inspiring, mysterious and highly dangerous to anyone except the pure of heart.

The stories are full of humor and wit, but I put them down with a bittersweet feeling. As one of the blurb writers said, Nick's writings depict life's blessings—good food and wine, family, friendship and love—and also reflect a knowledge of how easily they can be destroyed by heedlessness, overreaching and the wheels of fate.

Nick is a native and resident of Rochester, N.Y. He has a blog. I've been acquainted with him for a long time. I've followed his career with great appreciation for his unique and quirky imagination and his dedication to his art.

I own and recommend his two novels, A Small and Wonderful Life (2006) and Valley of Day-Glo (2008). I can't understand why they're not cult classics. Maybe they are, and I don't realize it. However this may be, he has surpassed himself with Giovanni's Tree.