Tessa Duder: In Search Of Elisa Marchetti

By MARGIE THOMSON

The narrow, congested streets, one-way arrows, unmarked dead ends and impatient drivers that Duder found in the Tuscan city of Livorno, where she visited last year to uncover her family's Italian roots, are the perfect metaphor for the genealogical voyage of discovery she was undertaking.

Any of the many thousands of New Zealanders who have also tried to get through that Checkpoint Charlie that is time itself to visit that other country, the past, in search of long-dead relatives and a better grasp of their own identity, will sympathise with the frustrating nature of such projects.

But the tenacious will recognise the thrill of discovering those small nuggets that unlock the secrets of those ancestors and, with just a little imagination, make their lives visible again.

Like most New Zealanders, Duder comes from mixed stock: English, French, Scottish, Irish and Italian. Because she had lived with her Italian grandmother as a child, Duder has been strongly influenced by that side of the family, but it wasn't until she was almost 60 that she decided to research the how, when, why of her Italian forebears' - the Lenzinis of Livorno - immigration from Italy.

Heading for Italy, she imagined herself easily finding some long-lost Italian relatives.

She thought the experience would culminate in "a long, Italian lunch, al fresco, outdoors, passing the Chianti ... I would be feted as a great-granddaughter of the long-lost Natale Lenzini and Elisa Marchetti".

Well, any genealogical enthusiast will have a good laugh over that, and Duder found quickly her chances of tracking down any Italian Lenzinis with abiding family stories about the family who 100 years ago went to live alla fine del mondo were almost - but not quite - zilch. But along the way she gains a new appreciation of Italian bureaucracy and sense of urgency.

Just as she is about to send off letters to every Lenzini in the Livorno phone book a friend tells her that he once sent a passport to Rome as expensive urgent mail, and it took two weeks.

She sightsees, is written about in the local paper, stays in a classic Tuscan villa, drinks wine, eats many fine meals and finally gets a phone call that seems to herald some exciting news.

Accounts such as this are difficult beasts: they must tell several stories at once, including the author's own search; a travelogue of the place in which the search takes place; the eventually unearthed story of the ancestors in question and the placement of those ancestors in the world as it was in their own time.

The account must also fight for an existence beyond that which will interest only members of the immediate family.

It's a tough ask, and Duder works hard to place her family's history within the general history of our young country. Often, though, it fails to grip.

Luckily for Duder, Tuscany is still the queen of tourist destinations so, while I found the travelogue tangential and was made impatient by the slow pace of discovery, others may enjoy her descriptions and stories of that famous region.

The detailing of her search will be interesting to anyone contemplating a similar project, but I couldn't help regretting that Duder hadn't applied her considerable fictional skills (she's won many awards for her books for young people) to her family's history, and turned it into a novel instead.

* Penguin, $29.95