The novel describes the life of Anna d'Amio from Mussolini's Italy to Pittsburgh in the 1960's.
FORGOTTEN OBJECTS traces the life of Anna d’Amio, daughter of opera singers Louis and Francesca d’Amio, from Mussolini’s Italy to the city of Pittsburgh during the mid sixties.
The novel proper is made up of three parts: Italy, Cuba and United States. Married at seventeen and widowed at twenty, Anna leaves war-torn Italy to find her fortune in Cuba, where she eventually meets Ramón Contreras, a wealthy tobacco grower who later becomes her second husband. The idyllic world that the couple had so laboriously built suddenly comes crashing down after the communist take over of the island and Ramón’ s sudden and violent death.
Now with two daughters under her care, Anna soon realizes that there is no future for them in Cuba, so she opts to send them to the United States through the Pedro Pan Program. Eventually she comes to the US herself, but by then the girls have been placed in foster homes. It is during this stage of her life, penniless and without influence, that she must make the greatest sacrifices to regain custody of her daughters.
At the end of the novel, we find a series of letters, all dated 2005, that were exchanged by the sisters after their mother passed away. Anna left behind a box containing a collection of sundry items that she had gathered throughout her life. Cognizant that these were significant for their mother, they attempt to piece together a sketch of her life through these forgotten objects.
Professional Reviews
Forgotten Objects: the power of a talented writer, named Carlos Rubio
This is a book to savor in a rainy afternoon, because the power to absorb the reader into a parallel reality will make you forget about everything is going on around you. Suddenly, the scenes from the book will seem more familiar than the rainy weather, the feeling and experiences of the characters will be like they are all happening to your best friend. This is the power of a talented writer, named Carlos Rubio, the power to take you deeper, beyond the written lines, to make you feel like you actually live in the written story. The author is native from Cuba, but have studied the art of writing in USA, after his arrival in 1961. He has written books in both languages and he did a great job in both cases, since his books are very much appreciated and awarded.
This particular book is sewed around the life of a character, more exactly Anna D’Amio. The story starts with the basic beginnings of her mother and father, for the reader to understand better the background of the main character. The action is placed in Italy of the 1960’s, during the reign of Mussolini, by the time Anna’s parents were raising starts on Book Forgotton objectsthe stages of the opera. The author presents in the most beautiful and artistic way possible the indestructible love story between Francesca, the mother, and Louis, the father. But the idyllic story is torn apart by the sudden death of Louis. This is where the amazing skills of the author step in, by depicting in words the intense states of mind of Anna’s mother and the constant struggle to raise two children.
Anna D’Amio, although was born from passionate love, will not have the same luck to find happiness with a single man. The story follows her from Italy to Cuba, and eventually USA. Although the author leaves the impression that Anna had found her luck and fortune in Cuba, things are not ending up like this and tragedy hits again our character. To protect her two daughters from the restless background of Cuba, she sends them away to USA, only to find them put in foster homes by the time she manages to arrive in USA. The struggles of a mother, with a poor financial condition, with no relations and influences, being a total stranger in the world that she arrived, trying to win back her children is caught amazingly in words by the author. The fact the Anna D’Amio ends up realizing that dreams are made to be unreachable and that life has so many cutting edges, that in the end she admits to herself that a person can change so much under life’s circumstances that it can end up to be quite unrecognizable to our own self.
This is an amazing story with a complex content. The action starts softly in the 1960’s Italy, presenting the way things were happening back then, and it slowly moves towards, to the present days, the final chapter of the book being letters of Anna’s daughters, bearing the date 2005. This letters are actually a post-mortem continuance of Anna, since her daughters found a box of items, collected by their mothers throughout her life journey, item that most certainly had a deep significance and were silent witnesses of Anna’s most important moments. The journey of the character is amazing to read and has the power of engulfing all of your time, until the last page of the book has been turned over. It is a story that has the all, a bit of history from different times and places, love stories, deep drama, family stories and intense individual experiences.
The soft and elegant style of the author has the gift of catching any reader into his piece of art. And in a time when books are not so much appreciated, we are indeed in need of authors with such great power of creation to remind us all that a book has the power of fulfilling an afternoon, that for a moment seemed dull and uninteresting.
A novel about a family during World War II, set on the homefront in Springield, Mass., and in the South Pacific. The book focuses on four characters and how their lives were affected and changed during the war years.
Dublin 1941. A brutal murder. Mistaken identity. And barman Eamon Foley is running for his life.
Nine months later Foley is in a crowded pub, and his brother-in-law is shot dead.
