The Traces

Starred review from July 25, 2022
Staid plumbs her travels in Italy as a college student to examine “happiness, both intensive and sustained” in her beautiful debut. She draws heavily on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in which explorer Marco Polo recounts his adventures to the emperor Kubla Khan, and intersperses readings of that novel with accounts of her travels and reflections on memory. In “Thin Cities,” she uses Calvino’s reflection on the crumbling town Armilla to understand the fragility of happiness and to reflect on her response to Capri, a place she found “uncanny and pristine” with a “hallowed beauty” that leaves her “surrounded by a grace that grows cold around me.” “Trading Cities” recounts a deep sadness Staid felt after leaving Italy; “Cities and Names” describes train rides to Budapest, Vienna, Zurich, Berlin, Prague, and Amsterdam; and “Cities and the Dead” positions Rome as a “city occupied equally by the living and the dead.” Alongside Calvino, Staid weaves in the writings of myriad other thinkers: Aristotle, Anne Carson, and Cesare Pavese all make appearances as her ideas expand, connect, and echo. Staid’s evocative prose and insightful analysis are tough to forget. Readers will be eager to see where she goes next.