FOUR SEASONS IN ROME: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
Anthony Doerr
Scribner
Memoir
Hardcover: 1416540016
Paperback: 9781416573166

Anthony Doerr rides his bicycle home from the delivery room where his wife has just given birth to twin boys. He opens the mailbox to find a letter from the American Academy of Arts, stating that he has won the Rome Prize, a coveted honor for which he had been anonymously nominated four months prior.

Six months later he arrives in Rome with his wife and six-month-old children, determined to work on his novel about the German occupation of Normandy in the 1940s. Day after day the pages stare blankly before him, and instead his interest is captured by his immediate surroundings, a first-century Roman book titled NATURAL HISTORY by Pliny the Elder, and the daily wonderment of his twin boys.

Doerr attempts to grab hold of this foreign language and lifestyle that is Rome. He approaches Rome with no pretension or flip of the hand, but instead with a feeling that he is an outsider looking in, a child struggling to survive in a complex environment. Learning the correct words to order from the neighborhood grocer gives Doerr as much satisfaction as seeing his boys take their first step. In this way man and child together must navigate their way through the unknown, armed only with blundering curiosity.

Doerr sees not only Rome’s four seasons, but witnesses the death of one Pope and the election of another. Subsequently, a once-in-a-lifetime Roman event happens in the small fragment of time that Doerr graces its soil. He sees the childlikeness of an entire country as it mourns the death of its father and rejoices in coming of its new one, while holding his own sons in his arms.

FOUR SEASONS IN ROME is a love letter to a nation, written by a true poet of prose. Doerr captures everyday scenes and turns them into beautiful paintings in the mind’s eye. He is aware not only of the sky and the architecture, but of things as intangible as the wind coming over from the east. He describes characters on the street so vividly that we can believe we’ve met them ourselves, and he does it all with such humility that it is as if we were having a conversation with the guy next door.

In fact, Doerr’s “guy next door” quality is probably a large part of his charm. With an award he has not strived for and two children who have been bestowed upon him by the forces of nature, Doerr is merely a thoughtful observer of his own life, knowing full well that he has little or no control over how it plays out. His sentence stating “You find your way through a place by getting lost in it” sums up both his experience in Rome and that of caring for his children.

It’s this humor-filled and reverent acceptance of his day-to-day existence that makes him an “everyman,” and it’s his constant analysis of the wonders of the world that make him a poet of a higher plane. Doerr brings that plane down to us, and we are grateful to see the world through his eyes.

   --- Reviewed by Shannon Luders-Manuel (www.shannonluders.com)

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