The Fall Of A Sparrow - Hardcover

Hellenga, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684850265 ISBN 13: 9780684850269

Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1998

Synopsis

The author of The Sixteen Pleasures tells the story of a midwestern professor who, his career ruined by an affair with a student, travels to Bologna to attend the trial of terrorists who had killed his eldest daughter. 125,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Authors

Robert Hellenga is the author of The Sixteen Pleasures and a professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

Robert Hellenga is a professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

Reviews

A thoroughly absorbing and deeply moving consideration of ``the strength of love'' matched against ``the strength of death'' dominates this wonderful second novel by the author of the widely acclaimed The Sixteen Pleasures (1994). Center stage is Alan ``Woody'' Woodhull, a middle-aged professor of classics at a small Illinois college, whose oldest daughter ``Cookie,'' during a terrorist bombing of an Italian train station, is killed in 1980a senseless loss that pulls the Woodhull family apart. Cookie's mother Hannah leaves her husband and enters a convent. Younger siblings Sara (who narrates part of the story) and Ludi go their separate ways. And Woody, an impressively well-rounded and endearingly decent human being, seeks consolation in the ancient writers he adores, in a passionate avocation as blues guitarist and singer, and in an ill-judged tryst with a beautiful Iranian student (whose mother had formerly been his mistress). Disgraced and suspended from teaching, Woody travels in 1987 to Bologna when the terrorists responsible for Cookie's death (as well as others) are brought to trial, and there he achieves both a vita nuova and a greater understanding of the forces that impel some people to become cold- hearted killers, others only well-meaning adulterers. In this amazingly rich story, Woody Woodhull is shown in the context of his many ``loves,'' is celebrated in generously developed scenes (many during holidays: ceremonies intended to bind people together), and is examined in superb extended conversations: Woody's Christmas visit from Hannah; a classroom discussion that makes you want to curl right up with The Odyssey; and, climactically, Woody's meetings with the agonized father of convicted terrorist Angela Strappafelci; and then--the book's most risky and powerful scenewith the unregenerate Angela herself in her jail cell. The primal power of family, and the limitations and blessings of the intellectual life, are unforgettably explored in a wrenching story that demonstrates precisely how ``It's not the great stories that give meaning to the little ones; it's the other way around. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Woody Woodhull, a middle-aged professor of Latin and Greek at a small Illinois college, struggles to rebuild his family, devastated by a deadly terrorist attack in Bologna, Italy, in 1980 that killed Woody's eldest daughter and 85 others. Woody's wife breaks down, regroups, and becomes a nun. His two surviving daughters grow to precocious womanhood. As Woody heads toward a new life, matter-of-factly accepting the consequences of an affair with one of his students, he is determined to see justice done for the lost child for whom he never stops grieving. In Italy, finally, he seeks release from his exhausting rage when the terrorists are brought to a court of law. Hellenga has written a masterly follow-up to his widely acclaimed The Sixteen Pleasures (LJ 4/1/94) that is steeped in the sophistication of 1980s Italy and the rich atmosphere of academia, where the multilingual characters effortlessly slip in and out of several languages as they quote from the classics in their day-to-day conversations. A perfect choice for book clubs.
-ABeth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: The Mountain of Lights

On Friday, August 15, 1980 -- Assumption Day, the middle of the August holidays -- a bomb exploded in the train station in Bologna, Italy, killing eighty-six people, including my sister Cookie, who was sitting in the second-class waiting room, about two meters from where the bomb went off, waiting for a train back to Rome.

The station has been repaired, of course, but part of it -- part of the waiting room -- was left the way it had been after the bombing. You can see the bomb crater, which is about the size of a bowling ball. I didn't see it myself till years later, but I often imagined it. Daddy had a picture, a poster, rolled up in a cardboard mailing tube at the back of his closet. On the wall above the crater a marble stone, a lapide, lists the names and ages of all the people who were killed. Cookie was twenty-two. She was on her way to study international law at the University of Bologna. We thought she was in Rome, staying with friends, but she'd gone up to Bologna for a couple of days to look for a place to live.

I was sixteen years old at the time, and Ludi was twelve.

The bomb went off at 10:25 in the morning. That's 4:25 in the morning in Illinois. We were all asleep.

Before breakfast that morning Ludi and I took our books and walked up to the cemetery to wait for trains, not knowing that Cookie was already dead, or close to it. Pretty soon the Illinois Zephyr came by from Quincy -- it ran an hour later on Saturdays -- and about half an hour after that we saw four freight trains coming together on the two sets of tracks that cross about halfway between our house and New Cameron. The Burlington tracks go over, of course, and the Santa Fe tracks go under, but it was exciting anyway, because for a while it looked as if all the trains were going to collide.

Our house was a quarter of a mile from the crossing, and at night, lying in bed, you could feel the house tremble when a train went by, and when the windows were open you could make out the different sounds of the different cars, boxcars and gondolas and flatbeds; and you could hear the whistles blowing as far away as Cass City, on the Spoon River, where Daddy used to go duck hunting with Peter Abbott from the Biology Department; and you could hear the engines switching in the hump yard in St. Clair, three miles away, and the loudspeakers blurting out instructions to the engineers. Overnight guests sometimes said they couldn't sleep; but the sounds had become such a part of our lives, like the sound of Daddy playing his guitar at night, that we didn't hear them till we went away, and then we couldn't get to sleep.

I don't remember what book I was reading, but Ludi was reading Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales. She couldn't get enough of those folktales, every one of which began with a king and three daughters. The two older daughters were always mean and ugly, but guess what? -- the youngest was always beautiful and smart and wonderful. We read for about an hour and saw a few more trains, and when we went back down Mama and Daddy were up and around, but we still didn't know about Cookie. After supper Daddy was reading The Lord of the Rings out loud to Ludi and me. He used to say that he'd read The Lord of the Rings aloud three times, once for each of his three daughters; but that wasn't quite true, because he didn't finish it the third time, which was for Ludi. We were getting close to the end, though. Frodo and Sam had climbed up Mount Doom, followed by Gollum, and Frodo and Gollum were teetering on the edge of the crater when the phone rang. Ludi had been upset by the death of Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit and Daddy'd promised her that no one really important dies in The Lord of the Rings. But things were not looking good for Frodo, and Ludi was nervous, and when the phone rang she started to cry "You promised."

It was Allison Mirsadiqi an old friend of Daddy's, calling from Rome to tell Daddy about the strage, which is Italian for massacre or slaughter. She was worried because Cookie had called on Friday morning to say she'd found an apartment and would be back that afternoon. Allison had spoken to an official at the city hall in Bologna. Cookie's name hadn't been on the list of dead or injured, but a lot of bodies hadn't been identified, and over two hundred people had been injured. Everything was in chaos.

Daddy was saying uh-huh, uh-huh on the phone in the upstairs hallway and shouting for Mama to get on the phone down in the kitchen, and Ludi was still crying "You promised." I'd heard the story before, of course, and I knew that Frodo wasn't going to fall into Mount Doom, and I kept telling Ludi that everything was going to be all right.

Daddy spent the rest of the evening on the phone, and the next morning, Saturday morning, he and Mama flew to Milan and didn't come back till the beginning of September -- classes had already started at St. Clair College, where my grandmother had gone to school and where Daddy taught Latin and Greek -- because Mama had some kind of breakdown and had to stay in the hospital in Italy.

I couldn't remember a time when the house hadn't been full of students and faculty on Friday nights, reading naughty poems aloud in Latin, or putting on Greek plays, or just singing and making lots of noise to celebrate the end of the week; I couldn't remember a time when Daddy hadn't made pizza on Saturday nights; I couldn't remember a time when Mama and Daddy hadn't made love on Sunday mornings, staying in bed till ten or eleven o'clock; I couldn't remember a time when Daddy hadn't told us a story and played his guitar for us every night, or a time when he hadn't been working on his book on the early Greek philosophers, which he was going to call The Cosmological Fragments.

But when they came back from Italy Mama needed to rest a lot, so we didn't have anyone over. In the evenings she stayed in her study and read her Bible and religious books that Father Davis from Corpus Christi gave her. She tried to get us to read them too: C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Father Ronald Knox. On Sunday mornings we started going to mass at Corpus Christi. Mama sang in the choir and went to see Father Davis two or three times a week, and helped him organize a novena, a series of prayer meetings at our house every Friday night for nine weeks in a row. Ludi and I didn't have to get down on our knees and say our prayers out loud, though Mama said it would make our grandparents happy in heaven, and Cookie too; but we had to come into the living room and let Father Davis put his hands on our heads and bless us; and then we had to pass around the plates of cookies that the women took turns bringing. And Mama ordered a tombstone for Cookie that said La sua voluntade è nostra pace on it -- His will is our peace. Daddy went to mass for a while, and he fixed supper for Father Davis once a week and drove him home if he'd had too much to drink; and he drank coffee with the people from Corpus and St. Pat's who came to the novena. But he wouldn't go along with the inscription for the tombstone. "It's a cliché, Hannah; it's the one line from the Paradiso that everybody knows because it's one of Matthew Arnold's touchstones."

"When something's a cliché there's usually a good reason for it."

Ludi and I, sitting at the top of the back stairway, could hear them in the kitchen, and I can remember how sick I felt, because I'd never heard them quarreling before, not like this.

"What kind of God would will a bomb to go off in a crowded railway station?"

"That's not what it says, Woody. Read the line. Please read it aloud to me."

But Daddy wouldn't read the line aloud, and pretty soon Mama stumbled up the back stairs, walking right past Ludi and me without seeing us.

In January Mama t

Edition details

• Publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684850265
• ISBN 13: 9780684850269
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464