Prick of the Spindle: Reviews: They Say by Joseph Torra

The Things They Say: A Review of Joseph Torra’s They Say
Quale Press, 2007
By Erin McKnight

They say every family has a story. Like the family, this story grows. They say the words of the story are its offspring: rivalrous siblings who posture and push and strike out and elude when shaped into sentences. They say these children are charged with potential; that the promise of an entire tale rests in the bold lines and curves of their individual compositions, the arrangements they adopt. They also say that although each word may render family chapters as scattered holograms of a sprawling saga, it is only when these words experience free reign, bounding across spotless pages with ink-dipped feet, that the authenticity of the family—its victories championed, its truths unraveled, its secrets exposed—is brought to bear.

Yet it isn’t merely the words selected to tell the story that establish the mosaic prose, reflective of any entangled family, but the manner in which these words submit. Whereas Joseph Torra’s words may disturb and reproach one another as they explore the convoluted history of the Pelligrino family, the absence of a parental voice, evidenced in the refreshingly sparse form and structure, allows for a youthful, sweeping range of words reflected in oblique sentences that unite lives and grant the reader a panoptic representation of a shared past.

They Say tells the story of a first-generation, Italian-immigrant family living outside Boston at the turn of the twentieth century. The bleak household is headed by Papa, a man who keeps the living room door locked when not in use, as a place to prepare for battle, spurred on by the compelling incitements of alcohol. His opponent, outmatched across the board, is Mama. Married at thirteen, in possession of one dress and no sense of what the ocean—although close enough to smell it—looks like, Mama’s continual defeat is recorded in bruises. Divided into two similarly aged sets are the “special” first two, and then the remaining Pelligrino children. Positioned on various pages, these siblings recount, discredit, and refine recollections that jostle and merge, enmeshing into an achingly authentic collection of memories.

Haunting the Pelligrino recollection is Louie, the eldest son. His early artistic ability served as the embodiment of American promise; his prolonged descent into mental illness the reality of old-world patriarchal cruelties. Even from behind locked hospital doors, Louie’s reflections are sublime: it is around his vision that other scenes materialize. His perceived solitary existence is a somber representation of the “darker pigments [that] rise, then are swallowed by compromise,” which is represented in his family members.

If some of Torra’s words are obscured by a shadow well beyond Louie’s institutionalized reach, it is the death of Rico that may be held accountable. If his demise from drowning left his siblings damp, Rico’s passing ensures that Louie remains submerged—his italicized elucidations and ramblings a manifestation of his continuous submersion in the murky waters of guilt.

During one of Louie’s “better” periods, he recalls an afternoon spent with his brother, Eddie, throwing rocks into a quarry and “watching the ripples until they’s all gone.” In the Pelligrino family, the rocks only become harder to lift, the increasing weight a result of worsening abuse, illness, poverty, illicit sex, illegitimacy and death. Although these rocks require multiple words to push them off the ledge, all fall into Louie’s dark water; despite the initial splash and seemingly overwhelming displacement, even the waves formed by the heaviest will become gentle ripples that subside with time and distance.

And so, when the extraordinary “highs and lows” of Louie’s ocean of “great, dark destroying power over which he has no control” grow calm, he recognizes that “sometimes water is transparent.” His siblings may traverse each other’s recollections as they attempt to actualize their individual tales, but when the reader looks into the water, scenes that swirl within the same tide are revealed. These may attempt to rise to the surface more quickly or diffuse more widely—indeed, “they never appear the same way twice”—but are nevertheless elements of the same body.

They say that variations “know no limits,” that these adaptations are responsible for breathing life into a story, infusing it with a depth and truth not susceptible to a linear expression of knowing. If the words which compel Torra’s provocative tone also represent for the Pelligrino family such a possibility, despite its weighty record, then limitations never existed. Its story, as they say, is complete.

Born in Scotland and raised in South Africa, Erin McKnight now lives in Dallas. She is the fiction editor for Prick of the Spindle, and is an assistant fiction and nonfiction editor for The Rose and Thorn Literary Journal. Her writing has appeared in: Siren: A Literary & Art Journal, Ginosko Literary Journal, DiddleDog, The Bergen Street Review, The Flask Review, Flashquake, PRECIPICe, Why Vandalism?, and The Houston Literary Review, among others.