Julia Blackburn

Sarah Bakewell wrote in the Sunday Times:

Walking with shadows

This beautifully imagined chronicle unearths the secrets of an Italian village whose inhabitants were cast as 'half-humans' by their landlords

Julia Blackburn is a chronicler of unusual lives, especially those of people who become uprooted or removed from familiar territory in some way. Daisy Bates in the Desert was about a woman who moved to the Australian outback in her fifties; The Emperor's Last Island concerned Napoleon's exile on St. Helena. The Leper's Companions, a novel, sent a modern woman back 600 years in time. In Thin Paths, it is Blackburn herself who is out of place. She writes of a remote mountain village in northern Italy to which she moved with her husband, Herman, in 1999. They entered an inhospitable environment of steep slopes, narrow paths, caves and crumbling stone houses. Yet the dramas of relocation are secondary; the main story is about the villagers themselves.

Learning Italian as she went along, Blackburn got to know people such as Nanda, who ran the village shop, and Adriana, who had long kept a diary of everyday life. They were surprisingly eager to talk about the past, and soon Blackburn had met several more people willing to write memoirs both for themselves and for her. She has woven the result into a many-layered book, into which she adds her own nature notes on the wild pigs, insects and dormice with whom the villagers share their lives, and a single, very personal chapter on her husband's battle with throat cancer and subsequent recuperation.

One of her first discoveries was that the villagers had, until recently, been considered mezzadri, or 'half-humans'. It is Adriana who tells her this, and she illustrates the concept by slicing one index finger across the other. They were people cut in two. Only half of what they owned or harvested belonged to them; the other half went to the local padrone or landowner - crops, meat, eggs, even the chestnuts they gathered in the forest when times were hard. Some padroni even exercised a droit de seigneur over the village women.

This serf-like condition changed with the second world war, which brought great suffering but also a chance to rearrange the social order. After Italy's surrender in 1943, partisans hid out in the mountains, fighting the retreating fascists. The villagers helped the partisans and sometimes joined them - but not everyone was on the right side. One of Blackburn's memoirists, Armando, writes down stories about the war every night and burns them every morning, because the truth cannot be told; it would upset too many people still living in the village. After the war, however, as one man explains, the padroni seemed less powerful and could not demand so much: "Little by little we stopped belonging to them."

Village life now is a strange mixture. People have mobile phones, of course, and even drive to the coast for keep-fit classes. In other ways it is still a life apart, especially for those who work as shepherds and spend much of the summer as solitary mountain roamers. Their closest friends are usually their dogs. Blackburn hears stories of one who settled down every Sunday at table to share a meal of pasta and sausages with his favourite dog, saying that the animal was wiser and better company than any human.

Animals fill the book, yet we are constantly reminded of how humans are set apart by their passion for communicating: telling stories, writing and drawing. Thin Paths is a book of traceries and inscriptions. It reproduces letters and photographs from the past, and maps sketched by locals to show Blackburn the routes of half-vanished mountain paths. There is much graffiti: one nearby cave is filled with carvings made by a long-dead local recluse, "the Hermit", who retreated there after being disfigured in an accident. He covered the walls with religious figures, dogs, cats, clocks, and a beautiful lion with the word "ROUR" spelled out beneath it. Another tumbledown house contains messages carved by someone nobody remembers: "Antonio Barbieri 31 July 1942. I am threshing the grain," and "I am planting beans but the rain is heavy and so I am sheltering here. 3 May 1945."

Thin Paths is a meditative book, with a static feel; the beginning is slow. But it soon begins to weave hypnotic tracks and tracings around the reader, so that by the end it has become a book impossible to forget. A story of survival, of connectedness, and of the way humans leave their mark both on landscapes and on each other, it is beautiful and deeply humane.

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Jeremy Lewis wrote in the Literary Review:

The Hills Are Alive
Thin Paths: Journeys in and Around an Italian Mountain Village

Twelve years ago Julia Blackburn and her husband moved into a house high up in the mountains near the Ligurian coast, within hiking distance of the Italian border with France. It is an inaccessible and isolated part of the world: the Mediterranean shimmers in the distance, but the hills are steep and rugged, peppered with the ruins of long-deserted houses, and for those who remain life is a hard and precarious business. Julia Blackburn spoke no Italian when they first came to their village: Nanda, who owned the village shop, soon took her in hand, and before long she had not only got to know most of her neighbours - among them a bonesetter, a turbaned shepherd and a retired postmistress - but was quizzing them about their early lives.

Living in the mountains, Blackburn tells us, 'has made me think that time past and time present and time future is like a vast landscape and we are walking through it on a tracery of thin paths'. Exploring their new home and the surrounding country not only involved clambering up vertiginous, overgrown paths, but delving into a harsh and poverty-stricken past, and Thin Paths interlaces lyrical descriptions of bare mountains and green valleys with sombre memories of prewar and wartime Liguria. 'We were mezzadri,' a local woman tells Blackburn after recalling how as a child she often went hungry. Mezzadri were 'half-people', who owned nothing and gave half of all they produced to their padrone or master - who might well have been an absentee landlord living in Rome who fathered his fair share of the local children in a twentieth century variant on the feudal ius primae noctis. Nor were the mountains exempt from the ravages of war: Liguria was a centre of partisan activity against the Germans and Mussolini's fascists, and many of Blackburn's older neighbours recalled only too well the reprisals exacted by both sides. A recurrent memory was of how the partisans lived off nothing but chestnuts when hiding out from the enemy, as a result of which their faces were covered with sores.

An entertaining antidote to grim memories of the past - and her husband's treatment for cancer - is provided by the local wildlife, which gives Thin Paths much of its colour and vitality. Blackburn writes wonderfully about animals: she is affectionate, observant and anthropomorphic without being glutinous or sentimental. 'There was something so awkward and apologetic in his manner that I said, "Oh, hello!" as if I wanted to reassure him,' she recalls after waking up to find a huge beige beetle lying on her pillow. He refuses to budge when she gives the pillow a shake, 'but after a while he tried lifting one hooked foot and then another, like an impatient horse, and suddenly, without a backward glance or a word of thanks, he launched his improbable body into the night and was gone'. She hears a marmot 'whistling to its friends with the same shrill cry of someone whistling for a taxi in a crowded street'; a lizard warms himself in the sun, 'his thin fingers drumming on the stones, his tongue flickering to pick up sounds of danger'. She begs the scorpions to leave her in peace, 'although I'm not sure which part of their jointed anatomy they use for the purpose of listening,' and notes how 'the whole night is alive with the excitement of dormice parties, especially when the moon is full' (the edible dormice, we learn, are best eaten with chestnuts and polenta). Hunting dogs have 'ears flapping like oven gloves', and a dead mouse in a water butt 'was poised spread-eagled on the water's surface like a sky-diver surrounded by clouds'.

Julia Blackburn is a marvellous writer, but because the subject matter of her books is so diverse and unusual she doesn't get the attention or the acclaim she deserves; publishers, literary editors and booksellers like writers who can be neatly categorised, and she may be too unpredictable and original for her own good. Thin Paths is not as memorable or as striking as The Emperor's Last Island (Napoleon on St. Helena) or Daisy Bates in the Desert (an Edwardian Englishwoman living among the Aborigines) or The Three of Us (her childhood in an ultra-bohemian household), but her writing is as eloquent and elegant as ever.

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Lee Langley wrote in The Spectator:

Wool of Bat and Lizard Leg

When Julia Blackburn and her Dutch husband Herman move into an old village house perched on a cliff high above the Italian Ligurian Riviera they become part of a dwindling community in a landscape of forests and deserted villages with roofless ruins almost swallowed up by the riotous undergrowth.

Seven hundred peasants once occupied this mountainous terrain, scraping a pitiful living: shepherds, chestnut farmers, cheese-makers - mezzadri, 'half-people', handing over half of everything, down to their last kilo of olives, to the padrone who was virtually their feudal lord; also sharing, when required, their women. They got by on a diet mainly of chestnuts - eaten raw, boiled, roasted, ground into flour, supplemented by an occasional thrush or dormouse.

Thin Paths is subtitled 'Journeys in and Around an Italian Mountain Village', but as always with Blackburn, things are not straightforward, and its chapters trace other, more fugitive inner journeys. As she puts it in her epigraph, with a nod to Eliot and Proust, '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.'

In The Emperor's Last Island Blackburn followed Napoleon to St. Helena, exploring not only the place and its imperial prisoner's last years but her own obsession. With Daisy Bates in the Desert her identification with her anbiguous subject became so strong that Daisy and Julia fused, leaving the reader not always sure whose inner turmoil was under scrutiny. In Liguria Blackburn catches the last survivors, some in their nineties, in time to hear echoes of a culture that is already a part of the past. At first speaking only a few words of Italian, struggling with the local dialect, she begins a notebook, writing down the names of neighbours, hearing their stories, increasingly drawn into their lives, being changed by them.

Slowly, she begins to experience 'a delicate and tenuous sense of belonging'. Friendship supplants curiosity. She hears of long-ago courtships and marriages, stoicism, hardship, a stubborn attachment to place, traditions now lost. In winter, walking to school, children each carried a log for the classroom fire. An old man recalls his mother trudging through the forest with a basket on her head, a pack on her back, a goat tied to her wrist, busily knitting socks as she walked. Today he has a solar panel on his roof. Where once there was an open fire for cooking, a table of chestnut wood, water from the stream, there are now mobile phones and electricity; the village shop is air-conditioned.

The old life died in 1940 when Italy entered the war. Blackburn hears of conflicting loyalties, horrific violence, the villagers caught between the Fascists and the partisans, boys shot in reprisal, houses burnt down. She is given 'war diaries', scribbled on pages torn from a notebook.

This is a story that deals not only with loss, but with rediscovery: Blackburn and Herman met when she was 18 and he was 29, but had led separate lives for 'almost a generation' until he showed her the ruined house he had bought and restored. Brought together, they settle, acquire new skills: grow olives, make oil. Blackburn learns to live with scorpions in the bedroom, 'shiny, pincer-fronted, arrow-tailed', and helps an injured bat. A beetle as big as her hand lands on her pillow and is coaxed back outside. Golden-eyed toads and salamanders bask in the water-tank. All become precious to her.

As the couple explore the forest, hacking their way through overgrown paths, encountering wild boar, getting lost, finding wild strawberries. Blackburn's evocative, subtle prose gives us vivid glimpses of the almost perpendicular landscape and its rough beauty. Her black and white photographs punctuate the pages, putting faces to Adriana, Arturo, Nella and Nanda.

When Herman is diagnosed with cancer of the throat, his intensive treatment in Amsterdam, their fears and his slow recovery are not dwelt on here; the two make laughing but practical arrangements, buy a double plot, 'a matrimonial bed, as it were', in the village cemetery.

There are touching, cryptic journal notes: 'Six years since I first set foot in this house, my heart to his heart.' Brief family references: '28 Dec. The children have been and gone.' Twelve years pass; Herman's curls are grey, and she notes ruefully that her body has 'softened'. Their faces are lined. 'I would like to write about love and old age and travel and the fact of death,' Blackburn says. She has succeeded.