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WORK TITLE: Things That Happened Before the Earthquake
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.chiarabarzini.com/
CITY: Rome
STATE:
COUNTRY: Italy
NATIONALITY: Italian
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born Rome, Italy; partner’s name Luca; children: Sebastiano and Anita.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, and novelist. Previously taught at City College, New York, NY.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Vogue.
SIDELIGHTS
Although born in Rome, Italy, Chiara Barzini spent her teenage years in Los Angeles, California, and became a journalist and screenwriter. She also taught at City College in New York before moving back to Rome. In the summer of 2015, Barzini wrote an essay for Vogue magazine about her experience as a teenager transplanted from Rome to Los Angeles by her parents, who were filmmakers and wanted to try to make it in Hollywood. “Meanwhile, their homesick daughter was left to fend for herself in a massive public high school populated by Valley Girls who were obsessed with going to Starbucks and boys bent on establishing their gangster cred (students were forbidden to wear red or blue, both gang-related colors),” noted Vogue Online contributor Lauren Mechling.
Barzini drew from her own past and the essay she wrote about it for her debut young adult (YA) novel titled Things that Happened Before the Earthquake. Although she had initially wanted to write a memoir, Barzini decided that a novel would give her more creative freedom. “With memoirs, you have so much anxiety about trying to be very true to the facts,” Barzini explained to Last Online contributor Jonathan Shia, adding: “You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings and you want to be honest and there’s no narrative arc necessarily. I had very intense experiences when I was living there and I wanted to transform those emotions into something that would be declared as fiction and invent on top of the emotions that I had had.”
Things that Happened Before the Earthquake revolves around Eugenia, an Italian teenager who finds herself living in Los Angeles just a few weeks after the city’s 1992 riots left behind a path of destruction. Eugenia’s filmmaker parents have brought her to the San Fernando Valley while they try to make it big in America. Eugenia is extremely unhappy with her new life. Not only is she struggling with her own self-identity, as most teenagers do, but she is also trying to adjust to a very different country and society. Eugenia’s new school is huge and includes Crips, Bloods, and Persian gang members. Eugenia is also distressed by the endless cars and smog in a place where no one ever walks anywhere and fast-food franchises abound. Nevertheless, as noted by Kathy Sexton in Booklist: “Los Angeles is dirtily yet lovingly depicted” by Barzini.
Eugenia eventually settles into her new environment. She makes friends with the misanthropic, one-eared Henry, who manages a movie memorabilia store owned by his mother and ends up giving Eugenia drugs. Another friend is Deva, who introduces Eugenia to a whole counter-culture world in Topanga Canyon. Eugenia, who feels her parents do not pay enough attention to her, is drawn into further experimenting with sex and drugs as she struggles to find out who she really is. Although Topanga Canyon and the people who live there are beguiling to Eugenia, she soon learns that they live by a very strict code that Eugenia seems to be breaking. The people Eugnia becomes involved with include a drug dealer who is into scream therapy, a former rock star who has become an alcoholic, and two Valley girls who become connected with a murder. “Barzini invents a cast of disturbingly odd characters,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor.
Eugenia eventually begins to establish her own identity and starts to imagine a bright future. However, her dreams of the future, as well as the foundation of her home, are rocked by the 1994 earthquake. “Barzini’s characterization of Eugenia is vivid and immediate, while the protagonist’s parents offer welcome comic relief,” wrote Cary Frostick in School Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly contributor called Things that Happened Before the Earthquake” richer and darker than a typical teen-angst story.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2017, Kathy Sexton, review of Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, p. 18.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Things That Happened Before the Earthquake.
Publishers Weekly, June 19, 2017, review of Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, p. 88.
School Library Journal, January, 2018, Cary Frostick, review of Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, p. 92.
ONLINE
Chiara Barzini Website, http://www.chiarabarzini.com (April 26, 2018).
Last Online, https://thelast-magazine.com/ (August 28, 2017 ), Jonathan Shia, “Chiara Barzini on Growing up Italian in Nineties Los Angeles,” review of Things That Happened Before the Earthquake.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (June 2, 2017), Louisa Ermelino, “Under the California Sun with Chiara Barzini,” author interview.
Signature, http://www.signature-reads.com/ (August 16, 2017), Jennie Yabroff, “A Roman Girl Moves to ’90s Los Angeles: An Interview with Chiara Barzini.”
Vogue Online, https://www.vogue.com/ (August 15, 2017), Lauren Mechling, “A Feverish, Unflinching Look at Coming-of-Age in 1990s Los Angeles.”
A Roman Girl Moves to ’90s Los Angeles: An Interview with Chiara Barzini
By JENNIE YABROFF
August 16, 2017
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Teenaged Eugenia has just moved to Los Angeles from Rome, and is about to start school. The year is 1992, and Eugenia is feeling sharp in her new Reebok Pumps. “If you worry,” her glamorous Italian movie star mother reminds her, “just pump your shoes.”
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Sneakers turn out to be the first of many bad choices that Eugenia makes in Chiara Barzini’s arresting and unforgettable new novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake. When Eugenia walks through the door of her San Fernando Valley high school, she discovers the local girls favor heels; the boys dress in gang colors. It is the height of racial tensions following the Rodney King verdict; OJ’s trial for the murder of Nicole Simpson looms on the horizon. Eugenia self-medicates the pain of dislocation with casual sex and long walks along Sepulveda Boulevard before finding her own inner California Girl in the overgrown landscape of Topanga canyon.
The novel is based on Barzini’s own experiences moving from Rome to Southern California as a teen, an experience it took her decades to make sense of but which, she says, fundamentally shaped who she is as a writer. She spoke to Signature from Rome about the differences between Italy and the U.S., writing in English, and why she wrote a novel instead of a memoir.
SIGNATURE: Your novel takes place in Southern California but you live in Rome. Was it hard to write from a distance?
CHIARA BARZINI: I wrote it in Rome and then I tried to take mini trips to L.A. to get back in the mood and do some research. I started writing it when I had my first kid. There were a lot of five a.m. alarm clocks. Carving out time when I had moments. But it felt like something I had to do, so I was charged by it. Having kids, you have so much less time, so the time you do have is so much more precious. I was like, “can I have two kids and write a book? Yes!” But it did take me a long time, from start to finish like five years.
SIG: Did you have the idea since the time you lived in L.A. as a teenager?
CB: I did. After I left I would tell stories and by people’s reactions I realized that a lot of what I had seen was so different from Italy. At that age you are so unconscious, you’re just like an ‘on’ button. I would sometimes think, can you believe this really violent thing is happening? I think you don’t process things like that as a teenager, and then when you’re an adult you’re like, what happened? It’s an age where you can take in a lot without suffering, or you suffer in a different way. I was in warrior mode; I wasn’t thinking about it, just going through it.
SIG: Was it hard to find the voice for Eugenia that blends that teenage consciousness with an adult perspective?
CB: What’s funny is they did the audio book and one question was, how old is the narrator? I think the narrator is 25. I started thinking about writing this book when I was 25. That’s when I gathered enough consciousness. I had to develop a certain maturity of my own to have a bit of detachment. There were previous versions I started working on when I was exactly 25 that were more like memoir, and that just didn’t feel interesting, or it felt too close. It was a really long process, I had to mature into it.
SIG: How do you have the distance to know what to fictionalize?
CB: That’s what took so long. It started as a memoir, and then there was this weird limbo phase where I thought, I can’t write that because it didn’t happen. In the book, the night that Arash gets killed, which is something that really happened, I wasn’t there, and it didn’t occur to me that it would be interesting if Eugenia was there, if she was involved. When someone suggested that I was like, but that didn’t really happen! There were a lot of things like that.
SIG: Had you been keeping diaries or journals?"Having kids, you have so much less time, so the time you do have is so much more precious."
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CB: I had diaries, journals, a lot of photos I was taking at the time, and then I just developed a weird nostalgia fetish for Los Angeles. I started reading this amazing anthology called Writing L.A. I was constantly reliving the city through other writers, and having that as a source to go back to. The most influential was this woman called Lynell George. She had a story that was very much the mood of the early 90s, very racially intense. She had a sentence about when she was in junior high she went to more funerals than parties. There was something so authentic about that. The city was so violent. It was a story about someone getting involved in a gang confrontation. It was a really dangerous time, and she captured that very well and I was very inspired by it.
SIG: Did you involve your parents when you were writing? At what point did they read it?
CB: I gave it to both of them in December; my mom had a really heartfelt reaction. My dad has been a bit more detached about it. I knew that it would be a touchy thing. My mom is very loving, it brought up stuff for her, just remembering, and understanding that there were other points of view. The way I manifested my unhappiness at the time was rebellion. When I found the language to explain how I was actually feeling, that woke something up in her. Twenty years later I was able to navigate that a bit.
SIG: How was it writing in English?
CB: It was hard because I was in Rome, so I wasn’t hearing or speaking English. Then I started to listen to a lot of podcasts. Someone told me, just be in the language. I started listening to podcasts obsessively, listening to the tones of how people spoke, reading English, watching English shows. It was never a question of whether or not I should do it in English. It was definitely challenging, but for sure the language I had to write it in. The first short story I wrote was in English. Then I was reading literary journals, I was reading this journal called Noon all the time, and The Paris Review. All these places would excite me so much. There are no literary journals in Rome; everything here is so heavy, so that was a nice escape route.
SIG: What do you mean by heavy?
CB: There’s a very strong tradition. There’s one journal, it has so much weight and importance, it is “the” literary journal. In the U.S. it’s like, get three kids in the room, one will do the editing, one will find some money, you just do a journal yourself. That doesn’t really happen here. There’s not a community for young writers. Italians refuse to publish short stories because they don’t sell. For me short stories have been very exciting, more so than novels.
SIG: Why did you move back to Rome?
CB: I was teaching at City College in New York and I came back to Rome while I was waiting for a visa to come through. While I was here my friend Luca had been asked to write a screenplay adaptation of a cheesy romantic novel, and the director said, you should probably write it with a girl. Which is sort of the only reason female writers get called to work in Italy is like, oh we have a girl character, we need the female sensibility. We need to figure out what it feels like to be on your period when you’re twelve. So he called me, and we fell in love writing this cheesy romantic comedy which became a huge hit. It’s called “Sorry But I Love You.” They hired us immediately to do the sequel, “Sorry But I Want to Marry You.” Then it was like, should I stay here and write these commercial screenplays that are not exactly my cup of tea but an amazing learning experience, or should I go back to New York and try to teach Dostoevsky to people who say Dostoyevsky was a hater. I was teaching in Harlem and it was hard. So finally I decided to stay.
SIG: Are you going to write another novel?
CB: I want to. I hope I can. I do have an idea. Still L.A. The city is very different now. There’s some spots I can go back to that still have the same energy. I feel the same with New York. It’s changed so much, all these huge buildings but there’s something about it, if you go to the East Village, despite everything I still think you can feel the East Village. Even though it’s all condos you can smell it, under the dirt.
SIG: Do you feel like a citizen of both countries?
CB: When I’m in the U.S. there is that Italian part of me that thinks, oh my God, you guys work too much, or, why do you go to bed so early, or, why do we have to have dinner at six? There is that Italian voice in there. But there’s also that part that’s like, thank God for customer service.
A Feverish, Unflinching Look at Coming-of-Age in 1990s Los Angeles
Lauren Mechling's picture
AUGUST 15, 2017 8:00 PM
by LAUREN MECHLING
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Chiara Barzini's book cover for her new novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake
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Two summers ago, the Italian writer Chiara Barzini published in Vogue a comically tender essay about moving as a teenager from Rome to Los Angeles, where her filmmaker parents would pursue their dreams of “making it” in Hollywood. Meanwhile, their homesick daughter was left to fend for herself in a massive public high school populated by Valley Girls who were obsessed with going to Starbucks and boys bent on establishing their gangster cred (students were forbidden to wear red or blue, both gang-related colors).
Now comes a kind of extended companion piece, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, Barzini’s eccentrically charming fictionalized account of that chapter of her life. Rendered in feverish prose with an unflinching view of teenage sexuality and no shortage of feisty dialogue, Barzini’s fish-out-of-water tale is not going to be accused of being derivative (consider this a challenge to find another book with desert raves, temperamental fax machines, and the tragic death of a donkey).
Barzini, 38, writes fiction, journalism, and screenplays in Rome, where she lives with her partner, Luca, and their two young children. She spoke with Vogue while driving through Topanga Canyon. She was visiting Los Angeles for her book’s U.S. publication, “and reacquainting myself with the magical landscape where it all started.” All novels are autobiographical to some degree, but with a few revisions yours could have been sold and published as a memoir. Can you tell me a little bit about your decision to retain the element of fiction?
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The book started off as a memoir, and I was so bored by the constraints of the genre. There was so much that I couldn’t say and wouldn’t allow myself to write because it was either too true or not true enough. I am very happy with the freedom of having written it as a novel. Those L.A. years were so formative and I was quite young and impressionable. In writing the book I took a lot of the gut feelings with me—the panic, fear, excitement, and rebellion—and gave it a shape that felt right.
You wrote the story when you were in your thirties. What did the perspective of time give you?
The early ’90s was also a very violent period in L.A.: riots, earthquakes, floods, the looming O.J. trial and the specter of another set of riots. Even the music was loaded, but as a teenager landing in the middle of it, I had no way of discerning the good from the bad. I’d seen plenty of girls, and not just immigrant girls, develop a kind of handy unconsciousness. That’s something a lot of teenagers do in general when they are confronted with trauma. They kind of shut off. It definitely took me some years and a few more chapters in American history to understand the absolutely abnormal and somewhat traumatic nature of what was surrounding me. Why did you write the book in English, which you didn’t master until you moved to the U.S. in 10th grade?
When I wrote my first short story in English I was 16 and I felt a rush of freedom. I could be whoever I wanted. That has stayed with me. Originally I had started writing the novel in Italian, but I realized I was judging myself constantly. It took my friend [and Vogue contributor] Francesca Marciano, a bilingual author and screenwriter, to show me the light. She told me I should write the book in the language that felt true to the story, just like she had done. And that’s how it all started. You are in L.A. now, for an extended visit. If you were to write a nostalgic book about 2017 L.A. in two decades, what details would you want to make sure you nailed?
Pressed juice bars, UberEats, kale, palo santo, succulents, Game of Thrones, DIY domestic tutorials (build your own shed! Make your own beer! Ferment your own kombucha!). Conversations about TV—all you hear is “have you seen this? Oh but have you seen that?” That kind of hip-hop that’s popular right now where the guys just kind of talk and mumble. But also: intense political awareness and anxiety, RESIST bumperstickers, Black Lives Matter, feminist children, The Future Is Female T-shirts. And everyone seems to live in Joshua Tree now, so that would play a role in the book. I love the way you describe early ’90s party culture, and how you establish the role it played in suburban teen life. What did raves mean to you back in the day?
I discovered the rave scene in 1995. I was underage and those were the only parties in L.A. where you didn’t get carded. This was before the internet, so we constantly ended up lost in some desert driving around a lot. There were no cops, no ambulances, no parental control. Suddenly there was this tribe of people I was part of, and even though we were young we formed intense bonds. Driving around the Mojave desert in cramped cars or in the back of pickup trucks, looking for something called Moontribe Party, can do that to you. We got lost all the time and would just be out until morning going the wrong way on some freeway. Did you dress the part?
If you’re asking whether I wore plastic baby barrettes, florescent cropped halter tops, and a tiny furry backpack, the answer is yes. [laughs] Did you ever go to the Viper Room, which makes a cameo in Earthquake?
Yes, I did! I had such a heartbreaking crush on Johnny Depp and my dad had been invited to celebrate his agent’s birthday at his club. I remember dressing up and searching for Johnny in every room, praying I’d get a chance to just look him in the eyes once. The party went on until late. I fell asleep on the couch. Johnny never came. I cried on my way home. You’re amazing at dialogue.The way people speak has been a fascination since childhood. I am very good at imitating what I hear. Shortly after I arrived in L.A. I figured out how tease girls by imitating their Valley Girl talk. It was also convenient for me to copy them as a way to pass as somebody who belonged. I said “like” a lot. I still say it a lot. The Valley never leaves you.
Under the California Sun with Chiara Barzini
In her debut novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, Chiara Barzini tells a bittersweet story of transformation and discovery
By Louisa Ermelino | Jun 02, 2017
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Photo by Jeannette Montgomery Barron
Do you invite an Italian for lunch in New York City and take her to an Italian restaurant? Sitting across from Chiara Barzini to talk about her debut novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake (Doubleday, Aug.), I had a moment of doubt. Would you invite an American author in Rome to lunch at MacDonald’s? But it was a false alarm. I had forgotten that Italians are happy to eat Italian regardless of where they are.
And despite the fact that Barzini speaks beautiful English, perfected during her adolescence in Los Angeles, and wrote her novel in English, she is most definitely Italian: beautiful, sophisticated, charming, and happy to be eating Italian.
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We met in Rome, her hometown, three years ago. She told me then about her hippie parents moving the family to California to make movies, and it was obvious to me then that she had the material for a book. Things That Happened, based on those teenage years in L.A., is a coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water tale, the story of a naive young girl arriving in 1992 in a city still reeling from the Rodney King riots and a major earthquake—events that, Barzini says, “had an almost mythological quality.”
She was 15 years old; her brother 12. The family settled in Van Nuys, not the Beverly Hills Barzini had imagined. She went to Taft High School “with 3,500 students, where wearing blue and red was forbidden because they were gang colors,” Barzini recalls. It was very different from the small, classically focused Roman school she had left behind. Worse, despite her fluent English, Barzini was put into an ESL class; most of the other students couldn’t read or write English. Her salvation was the Norton Anthology of English Literature. “I found a copy, carried it everywhere, and made it into honors English.”
Things That Happened has a basis in real events, but ultimately it’s fiction. The narrator, Eugenia, is an endearing character plopped into terrifying circumstances that she manages to overcome with verve, a rebellious spirit, and help from the Madonna, whom she addresses in a running commentary. She’s mistaken for Hispanic and Persian in school; a teacher thinks she’s from Rome, Ga.; her clothes are all wrong; her parents are arrested for sunbathing nude on a public beach. The humor and absurdity are tinged with tragedy as Eugenia discovers her new country and herself.
Barzini’s creative gifts have some basis in her DNA. Her father, Andrea, is a film director, and her mother, Stefania, is an exceptional chef, but Barzini’s obsession was always with her grandfather, Luigi Barzini, whom she calls “my guardian angel.” Luigi studied at Columbia, lived in New York City, and worked as a journalist there. “I always wanted to follow in his footsteps, to live in New York, to be a writer,” Barzini says. Her grandfather’s most famous book was The Italians, published in 1964 by Atheneum. An instant bestseller, it caustically described Italian culture and character for the American market.
When Barzini’s parents decided to go back to Rome in 1999, she chose to stay, attending UC Santa Cruz, although New York was always in her sights. In 2001, she moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn; got a creative writing degree at City College; and worked as a waitress in Greenwich Village. “It was a restaurant where celebrities would show up,” she says. “I was pitching stories to Italian magazines—Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair—but was always trying to make rent. I couldn’t have cared less about waitressing.” Her fellow servers agreed, teasing her with comments like “Chiara puts the wait in waitress.”
And then, in 2007, Barzini got a call from Italy to work on a film, the romantic comedy Scusa ma ti chiamo amore. She moved back to Rome and began a career and also a love affair with her cowriter, Luca Infascelli. Her life settled there. She published short stories, worked on commercial films, and continued to write literary fiction in English.
Francesca Marciano, a friend of her parents, became a mentor. They had a lot in common: Marciano had lived in the U.S. and wrote and published fiction in English. (She was profiled in PW in 2014 for her collection The Other Language, from Pantheon.)
In 2012, Barzini published a collection of stories in English, Sister Stop Breathing, with small press Calamari. She sent it to Marciano and expressed her confusion about what language to write in, after six years in Italy. Marciano said: “What the fuck are you talking about? Write in your voice.” And that voice, telling the story of an Italian teenager turning Valley Girl became the novel.
It took Barzini almost four years to write Things That Happened. The first reader of her manuscript was her inamorato, Infascelli. “He told me that 570 pages was too long and cut it,” she says. “But the fact that he read it in English, that he did that for me, sealed the deal.” (The couple live together in Rome and have two children.)
Barzini had a choice of publishers for Things That Happened but ultimately went with Gerry Howard at Doubleday. He had met her grandfather and even edited a paperback edition of his book The Europeans. After the U.S. deal, Barzini says, “I suddenly became a hot property in Italy.” With success on both continents, she just might have it all.
This profile has been corrected: an earlier version misstated the year the protagonist arrived in LA, the name of the author's high school, the kind of school the author attended in Rome, the spelling of the author's mother's name, and that the author published fiction in Italy, which she did not.
A version of this article appeared in the 06/05/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Under the California Sun
Chiara Barzini is a screen, fiction, and journalism writer who was born in Rome and raised as a teenager in Los Angeles, where she became obsessed with canyons, quartz, and the Grateful Dead. When she moved to New York she steered her fascinations towards the discovery that a huge slab of granite beneath the city of Manhattan is the reason why nobody there is able to walk or think slowly. The absence of a mineral subterranean life and psychedelia in the city of Rome, made her return to the homeland a bit harsh, but opened her up to new interests including: abandoned castles and the nightlife of cattle. She lives in Rome with her partner Luca, their children Sebastiano and Anita, two cats, and one dog.
Contact: chiarabarzini@mac.com
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake
Publishers Weekly. 264.25 (June 19, 2017): p88.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake
Chiara Barzini. Doubleday, $26.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-385-54227-2
Barzini's moving and provocative coming-of-age novel follows a character charging headlong into the chaos of adolescence. Uprooted from her home in Rome by parents with stars and dollar signs in their eyes, Eugenia is forced to forge a new life for herself in Van Nuys, Calif. They arrive destination shortly after the 1992 L.A. riots; the city and Eugenia's psyche are fragile and unsettled. After her only friend is killed in a gang-related incident, Eugenia becomes transfixed by a mysterious girl named Deva and the allure of Topanga Canyon. Feeling overlooked by her movie-making family, she reaches out for acceptance through experimentation with sex and drugs, crushing and rebuilding her identity as the days pass by. While Eugenia has normal teenage issues, her maturity and the collision of cultures and personalities she encounters make this novel richer and darker than a typical teen-angst story. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Things That Happened Before the Earthquake." Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 88. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643851/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4d7f62fd. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496643851
Barzini, Chiara: THINGS THAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE
Kirkus Reviews. (June 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Barzini, Chiara THINGS THAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE Doubleday (Adult Fiction) $26.95 8, 15 ISBN: 978-0-385-54227-2
An Italian teenager discovers sex, drugs, and decadence in Los Angeles.In May 1992, while shooting a commercial in Rome, director Ettore gleefully tells his family they will be moving to Hollywood, "where it's always summer," so he can pursue his dream of making a horror movie. His daughter, Eugenia, is horrified, especially after she watches news footage of the Los Angeles riots; the reality, she soon discovers, is as dispiriting as she feared. In a city still reeking of fumes, the family settles into run-down Van Nuys, furnishing their house with yard-sale purchases; Eugenia is thrust into a huge high school where students are warned not to wear gang colors, and no one, including teachers, has ever met an Italian. Barzini (Sister Stop Breathing, 2012) skewers Hollywood pretensions and Southern California teen culture--vacuous, self-absorbed, insular--and conveys, in graphic detail, Eugenia's strategy for dealing with her unhappiness: meaningless sex. Cloaked in a metaphorical "rubber suit" to ward off emotional involvement, she fills her life "with the presence of sex, as much as I could, as hard as I could," easily seducing classmates and adding to her conquests a depressed goth screenwriter hired by her father. Barzini invents a cast of disturbingly odd characters: embittered, misanthropic Henry, who supplies Eugenia with drugs and is missing an ear; a volatile, alcoholic former rock star; a hippie drug dealer who offers scream therapy; Eugenia's grandmother, who tongue-kisses her; two bored Valley girls who wind up abetting a murder; and many others. Eugenia idealizes Italy until a summer trip reveals a culture beset by misogyny, superstition, and violent cruelty. Back in California, she becomes enchanted by the canyons' natural beauty, where she feels "something primal"; has sex with a mysterious girl who may be having an incestuous affair with her father; and takes more drugs. Finally, in a rushed climax, an earthquake shatters her father's illusions about filmmaking and draws the dysfunctional family closer together. A coming-of-age novel that fails to delve beneath the surface.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Barzini, Chiara: THINGS THAT HAPPENED BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427657/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3070e40c. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427657
Things That Happened before the Earthquake
Kathy Sexton
Booklist. 113.18 (May 15, 2017): p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Things That Happened before the Earthquake. By Chiara Barzini. June 2017.320p. Doubleday, $26.95 (9780385542272).
Eugenia is a teenager looking for her place in the world. This has been complicated by the fact that her hippie parents have decided to relocate from Rome to Los Angeles, chasing her father's dream of being a famous filmmaker. It is 1992, just after the Rodney King riots, and the family lands in Van Nuys, which is replete with gangs, drugs, and crime. Eugenia declares it "the wrong place at the wrong time" and sets out to make her way in a new school while vowing to return to Rome. She finds an escape through sex until she meets Deva, a mysterious and charming classmate. The novel has a strange juxtaposition of drama and leisure, reflecting Eugenia's inner and outer worlds. There are sex and drugs aplenty but also sweet, tender moments of first love and self-acceptance. Los Angeles is dirtily yet lovingly depicted. Though a stronger sense of time besides the bookends of the riots and an earthquake would enhance the novel, Barzini's is an impressive debut with a distinct point of view.--Kathy Sexton
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "Things That Happened before the Earthquake." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496084737/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f9b7dd2a. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496084737
BARZINI, Chiara. Things That Happened Before the Earthquake
Cary Frostick
School Library Journal. 64.1 (Jan. 2018): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
BARZINI, Chiara. Things That Happened Before the Earthquake. 320p. Doubleday. Aug. 2017. Tr $26.95. ISBN 9780385542272.
Despite the distinctly 1990s setting, Barzini's dryly funny, sophisticated tale of angst and alienation will resonate with today's teens. Eugenia's parents relocate from Rome to the San Fernando Valley, where her father hopes to make it as a screenwriter. Absorbed by their own ambitions, Eugenia's parents leave her to fend for herself in a city still reeling from the 1992 riots. Finding it difficult to fit in (in part because of her limited knowledge of English), she resorts to casual sex to seek out companionship and power, choosing her male conquests carefully. But it is the beautiful Deva, from the isolated Topanga Canyon, who captures Eugenia's imagination and, eventually, her heart. Topanga Canyon is a magical, beguiling respite from the concrete wasteland where Eugenia lives, but the canyon is an insular community with a code of its own, and Eugenia is trespassing. Barzini's characterization of Eugenia is vivid and immediate, while the protagonist's parents offer welcome comic relief. VERDICT Though sex, drugs, and alcohol figure prominently, this novel brilliantly portrays the teen experience--perfect for those who love coming-of-age stories.--Cary Frostick, formerly at Mary Riley Styles Public Library, Falls Church, VA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Frostick, Cary. "BARZINI, Chiara. Things That Happened Before the Earthquake." School Library Journal, Jan. 2018, p. 92. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521876254/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ddf9c1f0. Accessed 14 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A521876254
AUGUST 28, 2017 BOOKS
By
Jonathan Shia
CHIARA BARZINI ON GROWING UP ITALIAN IN NINETIES LOS ANGELES
If a person’s adolescence is a time of exploration, discovery, and growth, the same can be said of a city’s. Although centuries old, Los Angeles is a place that in many ways has only recently come into its own as a metropolis, and its boisterous, rowdy years of rapid development seemed to align with those of Chiara Barzini, the Italian writer whose propulsive and piercingly honest début novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, gently fictionalizes her own time as a newly displaced teenager in Southern California between the Rodney King riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake. “The book takes place during the Nineties, which I like to think of as the teenage years of Los Angeles, when it was eruptive and rebellious and completely out of control,” she says. “Now I feel like LA is in its early thirties or late twenties, so it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re going to get a nice place to live and we’re going to have plants in our garden.’ There’s something a little too pristine about it now. I do miss those elements of grit and discovery and adventure, but I think that in the right places you can still find that. As with everything in LA, you have to seek it out.”
Like Barzini herself—who now lives back in her original hometown of Rome with her longtime partner and their two children—Los Angeles has indeed settled down in the twenty-plus years since she first moved with her parents and younger brother to the Valley in pursuit of her father’s Hollywood dreams, but the book smoothly recaptures both the surging tangle of feelings she encountered as a teenager there and the rawness of a strange city that was rich with unexpected experiences. In Things That Happened, Eugenia at first resists her new home, where she faces the dual challenge of acclimating to a confusing country and accepting her own evolving identity, but eventually makes a home for herself in Van Nuys. Barzini admits that she originally planned to write a memoir, and many of the details in the novel are true to her own life, but she turned to fiction for the extra creative freedom. “With memoirs, you have so much anxiety about trying to be very true to the facts. You don’t want to hurt people’s feelings and you want to be honest and there’s no narrative arc necessarily,” she explains. “I had very intense experiences when I was living there and I wanted to transform those emotions into something that would be declared as fiction and invent on top of the emotions that I had had.”
An accomplished bilingual screenwriter and journalist, Barzini says she chose to write Things That Happened in English because it remains “a language of escape” for her. “It was a language that liberated me and it gave me the possibility of having a new identity,” she adds, although there is also the sense that this book, capturing her initial years in America, could only have been written in her blunt, direct second tongue. That additional distance is also reflected in the two decades she has lived since she first arrived in Los Angeles, time that has allowed her to reflect on what exactly everything back then meant to her. “The most interesting part was the fact that, when you’re a teenager, you have a way of guarding yourself from trauma and you have an incredible resilience and you have an incredible capacity to overcome difficulties and to move forward,” she explains. “I think I wasn’t really aware of what had been going on and what it felt like and what it was like at the time. I just kind of lived through it.”
Both subtler in its gradations of emotion and more extravagant in its occurrences and characters than many coming-of-age novels, Things That Happened also tracks the growth of a creative spirit. As Barzini did, Eugenia takes to carrying the heavy Norton Anthology of English Literature around as a shield of sorts, removing herself from her swollen public high school to her honors English class, where her teacher recommends that she pursue writing. Barzini points to Joan Didion—whose writing her own echoes at times in both style and theme—as an enduring influence on both her work and her understanding of the many faces of Los Angeles, from the faded Old Hollywood glamour of the haunted Hotel Alexandria to the persisting hippies of Topanga’s communes. “Didion did great work for me personally in terms of really breaking it down and showing me the city from a point of view that I couldn’t really understand,” she says. “How she’s able to coordinate the relationship between geology and geography and history and culture and how fundamental that whole aspect of nature and place is to the psychology of the city was exciting and important to me, because nature had a very strong impact on the way that I grew up, so to find a writer who was actually taking all of that into consideration was very, very formative for me.”
Now, as she finds herself in Los Angeles increasingly often—including earlier this month with her own family to promote this book—Barzini says Things That Happened has provided both closure and a connection with her past. “Being back there has been really amazing and also intensely emotional because it’s a sort of collapsing of all these different parts of me that haven’t really ever met in the same place,” she says. “It’s been great, but also a little overwhelming.”
Things That Happened Before the Earthquake is out now.