Customer Reviews

The Sicily Papers

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A few years ago, Michelle Orange left her Brooklyn apartment and her life in New York to go to Italy, in the deep south. She traveled around for a month in a country that she had started coming to a few years earlier. Each time she stayed a little longer. Each time she loved it a little more.

Then while she was there, Orange, who had written about Italy before, did something not many people do. Having left someone dear back home, she wrote him letters. Not emails, not text messages, but dead-tree letters.

Some time after she got back, a friend told her she was starting up Hobart Press's books division, and was looking for its first project, something readymade. Orange mentioned the letters (she had copies). The friend wanted them, but it took her months of thinking it over, before Orange was ready to hand them over.

Fortunately she did, and the result is the smart, fun little book "The Sicily Papers," which is bound like a fat passport, and which contains Orange's unadulterated thoughts and impressions and experiences in her month of traveling around southern Italy. For those of us who keep journals when we travel, the Sicily Papers will have a very familiar feel.

Orange starts out in Siracusa, on the east coast of Sicily, where she rents an apartment, has problems with men peeping into her bathroom window and wanders the boardwalks full of amorous young Italian couples. She practices her Italian, then moves on to Agrigento, then to Celafu, touching each side of the island while making friend, laying on beaches, gazing at volcanoes.

Along way, in her letters Orange digresses and ruminates and describes her days. She talks about books she's reading, happy times in her life, thoughts that just come to her, and of course, her thoughts on traveling.

"Come when you're young!" she writes, "Why do so many old people wait to travel? When I imagine them seeing things I am seeing and have seen at the end of their lives, I get very upset. It shouldn't be an afterthought."

There are many nice passages like that, and remind us of similar thoughts we've had on the road. Small things that, if you're not careful, can change the way you see the world.

"I used to see the societal shut down between 1 and 4 as ridiculous and quaint," she writes in another place, "now I see 9-5 as barbaric and faithless. It makes perfect sense that you should work from 9-1, then stop, just as you are itching to, and go remember that you're a human being for a while."

At times, Orange's digressions and wandering can be hard to follow. But that's also what gives this book its character: It's exactly the way travel feels. The Sicily Papers embodies this aimless joy in a way that most travel books don't. It has the texture of the journey. It has the feel of the unstructured days. And in the end it is almost like being there for real.

"It's not a vacation," she writes. "It's the month of the year I get to live my life."

The author eats a lot of fruit. Every male in Italy seemed to hit on her (in her mind at least). Very little information about Sicily.
As an Italian Citizen with family in Sicily, I found this little missive lacking all the way around.

This is a brilliant book, where the author clearly loves the language and is a powerful creator. If you like literature, you will enjoy this book immensely.