Purgatoire: A novel in stories
By Liz Prato
Forest Avenue Press (Portland), 2026
ForestAvenuePress.com, $18
By Daniel Buckwalter
Memories as shadows, as ghosts, some kept under lock and key, omnipresent if rarely acknowledged. Always, they exist, and no one can outrun them for long.
Those memories can blur, to the point where it’s fair to wonder if events truly happened as firm structures or were they distorted by agony, sadness, anger and despair. What is fact and what is fiction?
I thought of this quite a bit when reading Liz Prato’s excellent Purgatoire: A Novel in Stories, now out at Forest Avenue Press in Portland.
The Portland-based author melds skeletal facts (letters and legal documents) about her paternal Italian immigrant ancestors with a deeply touching fictional narrative. She explains in the author’s notes at the end that she “wanted the reader to have the experience of not knowing what was ’true’ and what was ‘fiction’ up front, as not to break the narrative dream.”
And it is a moving narrative dream, chronicling the descendants of Elisabetta Parella Mago (Sabé), who makes the trek in 1910 from northern Italy to a small Colorado outpost to join her husband, leaving her two young sons behind with her parents in the old country.
Except that the husband, Tobia Parella, has vanished, despondent, a victim of alcoholism and depression. Sabé never knew of this, and now she’s all alone in a new country to fend for herself, to somehow scrape together enough money to send for her sons.
It is hard. There is the loneliness, the anger and despair. Still, Sabé perseveres, marries Joe Mago, learns the parameters of the grocery business he has set up and finds her voice with Joe to get her sons, Nash and Pete, to the United States.
She creates a life through quiet strength and resourcefulness, enduring hardships with a fortitude that suppresses, I believe, any anxiety, heartache and embarrassment she feels about Tobia’s exit, allowing her to press on. Always, a stiff upper lip.
It’s a recurring theme for all the characters in Purgatoire, many of them women, with stories that span decades. And this theme reminds me of my grandmother in my step-mother’s family.
She was married to an alcoholic. He never drank during the last 15 years of his life, the years I knew him, but the stories told in whispers suggested violence and exhausted bank accounts.
She found her voice. She found her stride. She got a government job, earned enough to buy the house she and my grandfather shared and which I came to know well, and it’s a story I didn’t appreciate until recent years.
The endearing characters in Purgatoire are a reminder that while life will certainly have its difficult valleys to cross, there is dignity and humanity in enduring.
There is hope throughout for the characters, and this is what makes Purgatoire a wonderful, compulsive read. You will want to walk with all of them. In many ways, we could be the characters.
