Graeme Lay
David Ling Publishers
Otago Daily Times, June 10th 2006
In his new novel, Graeme Lay taps into one of the delights of genealogical research — the opportunity to reconstruct in imagination the individuals and lives that now exist only as fragmentary records.
He draws a mixture of reality and fiction together into a compelling depiction of the late 19th and early 20th century, based on the lives of his great-grandparents, Italian immigrant Luigi Baretti and his New Zealand wife, Alice.
I was fascinated by some of the historical material — for example a government-established farming settlement at Jackson Bay where Italians were restricted to growing grapes and mulberry for wine and silk, on the basis that crop cultivation was culturally determined.
In other parts, I was left speculating. Frances Hodgkins did indeed paint his great aunt Annie (it is her portrait on the cover), but did Luigi actually rescue a young KM from a rampaging bull?
I found Luigi convincingly three-dimensional and more interested than Alice or their children, making the novel for me more a personal journey than the love story it is marketed as (although this may just reflect my own romantic deficiencies). This notwithstanding, Lay has captured a breath of a colonial past that still feels fresh today.
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