New Year’s Eve comes around once a year, unless you’re time-zone traveling. On Sunday night, high above the dropping balls and popping champagne corks, some flight crews and passengers will ring in the New Year multiple times. For these special celebrators, midnight strikes again and again and again.
Mansour emerges as part of the last decade’s larger literary project centering women writers and artists who risked being left on history’s cutting room floor. Mansour has been brought to our present-day attention alongside notable peers such as Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington.
At their best, these essays retain the tender fluency of love letters written in the throes of a new relationship. In Basilica, Zarin recalls a time she used to hang out every afternoon inside the Basilica di San Francesco d’Assisi, admiring the frescoes, but even there she is conscious of “seeing through your eyes, which in any case had become a habit”. In Rome, the absent paramour is a “ghost”, who stalks her thoughts while she crisscrosses the Tiber looking for traces of the ancient theatre of Pompey, or dips into Henry G Liddell’s A History of Rome in a bar. After a while, Zarin reflects, “the ghost one knows too well is oneself”.
Few writers dare to cover the history of a single place over such an extended period. That Romano has done so is a gift. His book opens up new perspectives, helping to clarify both continuities and ruptures in the city’s history. Above all, it is a reminder that the future is never predictable.