The Minotaur at Calle Lanza

Released April of 2024

Throughout the first year of the covid pandemic, my girlfriend and I mainlined season after season of the genial PBS travel program “Rick Steves’ Europe,” seeking a habitable elsewhere in its images of crowded market squares and ornate palazzos. Nigerian American writer Zito Madu’s experience of the era was altogether different, thanks to an artist’s residency that brought him to Venice in the fall of 2020, a time when the city had been largely emptied out, especially of the tourists who normally drift along its canals.

In this memoir published earlier this year, that evacuated milieu becomes an occasion for Madu’s elegant meditations on alienation, especially from his own family but also from the overwhelmingly White world he moves through. His prose has the smooth and constant warmth of blood in a vein, a fluidity so steady it sometimes seems no different from stillness. Though Madu’s narrative culminates in a shockingly surreal sequence that is unlike anything I have read in a memoir, I will remember “The Minotaur at Calle Lanza” for its calmer moments: an African priest’s service in an otherwise Italian Catholic church or the quiet labor of a glass blower, a man content to carry on his business in silence “as if you weren’t there.”

- Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post