Very Valentine & Brava Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

Title: Very Valentine, and Brava Valentine

Author: Adriana Trigiani

Genre: Fiction

Toto Says:
 

The Valentine trilogy is a refreshing look at life in an Italian-American family.  Italian American families have a very delicate balance between traditions brought over from Italy and acquired American traditions.  Each family varies on how much of each make up their family life but Italian-Americans in and of themselves are their own culture.  This beautifully written trilogy is about a single woman named Valentina who struggles with being a modern woman living New York City and yet holding on to her “old world” traditions. 

Trigiani is a wonderful writer and has proven this over and over in her several best selling novels.  In both Very Valentine and Brava Valentine the reader feels as if they are sitting at the huge family table eating pasta, drinking wine and participating in loud conversation.  This isn’t your typical romance novel. You will never guess what is going to happen next or how it ends.  So come on and walk with Valentine through the countryside of Italy, swim with her in the caves of Capri, dance with her in Argentina and stand on her rooftop garden in Greenwich Village and smell the tomatoes.  Can’t wait for Part III!

Dorothy Says:

Ok, I have one gripe about Trigiani’s books; feel free to read them and judge for yourself.  Here’s the deal: within the entirety of the extensive family structure that Trigiani has created in the Valentine books, there is not even a single example of a decent marriage.  Now, you may be rolling your eyes as you read this, sighing, and saying “Who cares???”  Well, it’s my blog, and I care.   Allow me to first preface my remarks, and then air my grievance for a bit. 

Valentine Roncalli is the central character in the books. She is a thirty-something young woman, who is happily working her way up the ladder of craftsmanship in the family shoe business and on her way to becoming a master of custom leather shoes. She is pretty, funny, and socially adept, and she is not married.  THIS IS NOT MY GRIPE!!!  I love the character, and I’m not here to even insinuate the fact that because she is not married, she is in some way unfulfilled, deficient, or leprous.  In fact, I would be vilely offended if someone did try to make that argument.

Here’s what does irritate my sensibilities:  Throughout the first two novels in the trilogy (haven’t read the third yet), the author assigns a laundry list of infidelities, desertions, and tragedies to the married couples within the story.  To those married couples in the story who escape the plague of infidelity, there are other various and obnoxious qualities attributed or insinuated: Sister A’s husband exudes a caveman-era prejudicial streak as wide as the Mississippi; Grammom (a fabulous and peppy septuagenarian) professes to never having had joy with Grandpa, and the offspring of all these marriages are either constantly obnoxious, repressed into rigidity, or vehicles for bitterness. 

Now, I’ve read more than a couple of books in my life.  I am adequately aware of the appearance of the theme of infidelity and troubled marriages within literature; many of the best works in history address this in one way shape or form.  Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for example, is incredibly adept at portraying the joys and sorrows of the choices made by his characters.   However, I was very saddened by the incredibly wide brush of doom with which Trigiani paints matrimonial and family life in her stories.  Anyone who is married knows it sure ain’t easy, and anyone with kids knows the sacrifice that children entail.  That being said, all the freedom in the world can pale in comparison to holding your sleeping babe in your arms, or climbing under the covers to curl up next to your best friend in the entire world.   In the midst of all the day-to-day, there is an inherent and objective beauty to both Marriage and bearing children.  The fact that this was completely negated within the framework of the Valentine books is, I feel, a woeful injustice.