Book Review: FOUR SEASONS IN ROME by Anthony Doerr

Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"A year is an infinity of perceptions...This year has been composed of a trillion such moments; they flood the memory, spill over the edges of journal entries. What is it physicists tell us? Even in a finite volume, there are an infinite number of points."

I think this is my last book for 2022, and I consider myself very lucky to be able to finish this Roman treat while fresh from the excesses of Greece in Paddy Fermor's MANI and ROUMELI! To be able to book-end my literary adventures with Doerr/Fermor was an unexpected grace, especially since I had no idea Doerr wrote a travelogue on a year spent in Rome until I received an email informing me that it was marked down to 2 dollars on Kindle!

I've been a fan of Doerr ever since his amazing ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, and some months ago I also read his pandemic novel, CLOUD CUCKOO LAND. FOUR SEASONS IN ROME has themes present in the two other books, but it is extra special for fans of ALL THE LIGHT because it talks about one year (2005) that Doerr spent in Rome, with his wife and newborn twins, while he was working on what is perhaps his most famous book (which will become a Netflix mini-series in 2023, hurray!).

To be so close to the Vatican when Pope John Paul II passed, to have been amongst the crowd of smiling Romans who ran to St. Peter's as soon as bells pealed, celebrating the white smoke from the chimney of the conclave, to explore the ruins of a city celebrating the best (and worst) of Europe!!

The blurb of the book says that one shouldn't leave for Rome without this book, but I think Doerr shares this common trait with Fermor in that they write about the human experience of a place, not so much the logistics of sightseeing as seeing with the inner eye how one's soul is changed by a prolonged pilgrimage amongst such beauty. To borrow from Doerr, both authors write tributes to wonder itself.

Light features very prominently in Doerr's memoir, as does the act of seeing. Doerr challenges us to counteract entropy, to view the world with an infant's eyes. All places have their own beauty, Doerr writes, and their time in Rome just reminded them of this. What matters is how we view the world, and the kind of frame we use.

"The oculus of the Pantheon, the dome of St. Peter’s, the tufted pillars of the umbrella pines, and the keyhole in the green door outside the gardens of the priory of the Knights of Malta on the Aventine Hill—they are all eyes of God. We look through them; they look through us. Everything is designed around the light."

I end this last book entry of 2022 (good riddance, 2nd annus horribilis in a row!!) with what is becoming our family's battle cry, echoed in this beautiful book as well: "Keep the light on!"



View all my reviews