Book review: Thin Paths by Julia Blackburn

Thin Paths

by Julia Blackburn

Jonathan Cape, 272pp, 17.99

IN 1999, author Julia Blackburn began spending part of each year in the Ligurian mountains, where her second husband, Herman Makkink, had bought and restored a home earlier in the decade. Herman is a walker - his epic foot journeys have taken him across the Sinai Desert and into the depths of the Corsican mountains, and he discovered his Italian hideaway while hoofing it across the Alta Via, a mountain path running through the Dolomites. When Blackburn eventually joined him there, the first thing she packed was a pair of climbing boots.

Thin Paths, the successor to 2008's blistering memoir The Three of Us, tells the story of her new life in Italy. But although Blackburn is fully present and engaged, she is not the primary subject of this profoundly moving book. By immersing herself in the lives of her neighbours, and by gently extracting their stories, retold here in short essays that glitter like gold-leaf tesserae, she has crafted a vibrant mosaic depicting a lost way of life - and lives lost - that is never less than absorbing, respectful, and compassionate.

Blackburn's opening epigraph reads: "It's as if time past, time present and time future is stretched out around us like a vast landscape and we are walking through it on a tracery of thin paths." It is only by following these paths that you can make a place your own. Via a series of stop-start treks that often find them lost amid the trees for hours, the couple slowly lays down a series of mental maps that enable them to wind their way up, down and around the surrounding hills.

After each adventure they'd report back to the village elders, who marvelled, then recalled their own experiences of what it was like living in those now-abandoned hill settlements. And they, too, were full of questions: "Did you see my house?" "Is there still a name carved on the wall?" The questions led to anecdotes, and suggestions for future excursions, often couched in phrases such as, "Would you go see if you can find …"

The first section, Being There, sets the scene. We learn about the dormice and scorpions; we meet the locals Blackburn befriends, notably Adriana and Arturo and their children. There are glancing references to the way Blackburn and Makkink negotiate their rediscovered relationship: they'd been lovers decades earlier, but after they split, married others and raised children.

Near the end of this section Herman has a car accident, Adriana and Arturo's son, Marco, dies of cancer, and then Herman is also diagnosed with cancer. He and Blackburn return to his native Holland for treatment, and stay away for eight months. During that time, Blackburn marks his 35 radiotherapy sessions and four chemotherapy sessions on a cloth tape measure.

"Every few days I performed a theatrical ceremony in which I cut off the time that had passed and showed him the shortening length of time that was still to come . . . later he said that it was crucial to witness the past dropping away, while the future became shorter."When they do return, Adriana offers them two essential gifts. The first is availability. "Come and visit me. I am always at home," she tells Julia. To them both, she says, "Patience. We need patience in order to live." The wisdom of this comes into sharp focus during the next section of the book, War and Chestnuts. As Herman convalesces, Blackburn ferrets out Adriana's life story - later widening out to excavate other villagers' histories - digging deep pathways to the past. In the process she discovers how much her neighbours endured during the Second World War. As the Partisans squared off against the Fascists, they were regularly attacked, regularly starved - surviving on chestnuts and cat meat - and forced to make do without adequate clothing or shelter.

The old woman, Terzina, describes how a young man captured by soldiers and facing imminent death by firing squad lay down in the snow, arcing one arm overhead and extending his leg, like a dancer. Standing, she re-enacts his pose. "And she covers her face with her raised arm so as not to see the moment when the shot rang out and struck its target, then she and her husband look at the stone square in front of the church and watch with horror as the blood spreads out across the snow." With this, and a host of similar tales, Blackburn demonstrates how fluidly the past coexists with and informs the present in this part of the world.

By the final section, entitled Not Quite Five Nights and Then a Party, I was thoroughly enmeshed in the lives of these villagers. When Blackburn throws a party to thank them for sharing their stories, it's a joyful occasion for her friends, but sad to read about, as it signaled the end of an absorbing and wonderful book. Blackburn writes beautifully, and her touch is delicate, and despite its sorrows, Thin Paths is full of humour and pulsating life.