We’ve All Stopped Dreaming

LIKE HER FIRST NOVEL, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake (2017), Chiara Barzini’s new book, Aqua: A Story of Water and Lost Dreams, is a tale of two cities: Rome and Los Angeles. Moreover, Aqua grows out of that earlier novel to such a degree that it might have been called Things That Happened After Things That Happened Before the Earthquake, since the major motive for its writing is something magical—or almost magical—that the first book brought about. In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar Italia, Barzini’s interviewer begins by noting “the recurrence of magic in Barzini’s speech.” In another recent interview, this one with Vogue Italia, Barzini remarked: “I believe that writing is always a psycho-magical act [un atto psicomagico].” And indeed, one of the delights of Aqua is Barzini’s recounting of her Roman family’s varied notions of the magical. “In our household,” she writes, “magic isn’t just permitted, it’s cultivated.”