Into the labyrinth, across the abyss

About Rome, Anthony Doerr says this:

History lies beneath the city like an extensive and complicated armature. Emperors were stabbed beneath tramlines. Sheep grazed beneath supermarkets. The thirteen obelisks of Rome have been toppled and reerected and shuffled around so many times that to lay a map of their previous positions over a map of their current ones is to evoke a miniature cross-hatching of the city's entire memory, a history of power and vanity like a labyrinth stamped beneath the streets.

Doerr's new book Four Seasons in Rome is a memoir of his attempt to negotiate that labyrinth armed with a grant, a wife, their six-month-old twin sons, and an inadequate understanding of the Italian language. He struggles to write, sleep, think, and survive in a place where his babies suffer jet-lag and he doesn't know the words for diapers, fever, crib sheets, but most of all he observes the swirl of events around him and writes about them in prose that sings.

Rome, he writes, is "a contest between sun and shadow, kingdom and time, architecture and weeds. The shadows will win, of course, and time, and weeds. But this morning the match seems close." He muses on time and eternity, wars present and past, the nature of power and the power of change, and he records his observations with the wonder of a bright-eyed boy from the provinces who suddenly finds himself in the midst of the Eternal City, where he learns to see things new:

Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw--actually saw-- a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there'd be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs.

Doerr records his wrestling with the novel he had intended to write in Rome, a project he finally shelves in favor of a story that he takes through draft after draft, revision after revision; like parenting twins, writing is a perilous adventure through unknown territory: "[T]o write a story is to inch backward and forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, and the best you can hope is that each day you find yourself a little bit farther out over the abyss."

Four Season in Rome follows Doerr as he ventures out above the abyss, fumbles about to find his footing, and eventually arrives safely home again, a journey described in prose so compelling that readers will want to follow his path.