In a Dark Wood: A Memoir of Grief, Healing and the Mysteries of Love
A story of love and grief. ‘I became a widower and a father on the same day’ says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante’s ‘The Divine Comedy’ helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love.
On a cold November morning, Joseph Luzzi, a Dante professor, found himself racing to hospital – his wife, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car accident. In one terrible instant, Luzzi became both a widower and a first-time father. Adrift and grieving, Luzzi found himself sharing Dante’s dark wood with an intimacy that years of reading had never shown him: the words became a wise companion through the Inferno of his grief, his healing, and ultimately his rediscovered love.
‘‘In a Dark Wood’ charts Luzzi’s journey through the hell of mourning and the purgatory of recovery, juxtaposing diapers and dating with demons and the damned … there are many shrewd observations’ Financial Times -
Praise for Joseph Luzzi: -
”'Touches, lightly and elegantly, on politics, history, geography, sociology, language, literature, film, food and family … [There are] deeply felt stretches of memoir” - New York Times Book Review
”'A thoughtful book about exile, the sense of displacement and confusion that those driven from their roots carry with them forever” - Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement