Michael Paterniti

You expect essays to be inward-gazing, thought-provoking exercises in the acquisition of knowledge. What that often entails is also a certain claustrophobia, a kind of psychic noli me tangere above-it-all-ness. Author Paterniti avoids this fatally separate sense of insulation with the evergreen tactic of humor...but also of, in most of his essays, compassion. He tells us his stories without making either himself the star or himself the omniscient narrator of the foolish doings of Them.

It's a show more deft trick to pull off, this being part of, apart from, moved by yet not moving, the action and actors of daily life in many different places. Ukrainian farm life, Chinese urban life, US long-haul travel...all without leaving scars or enemies behind you. Quite a trick to sustain and more impressive to pull off as a career.

Obviously things are quite different in all the places and parts that Paterniti wrote about fifteen-plus years ago. In a certain sense I felt I was reading histories given the vantage point post-COVID and post-Russian invasion. When the collection of previously published work first appeared in 2015, reading these essays was less evocative of a distant and receding past. Revisiting the collection from today's greatly altered landscape made it feel disturbingly disconnected from our reality...in just seven years, the world of the late 1990s and early 2000s went from recent events to receding history!

The inflection points of recent times have been that powerful. I had not fully realized this until I read "The American Hero (in Four Acts)" from 1998 and thinking, "this is a different world entirely." While I found that a surprising reflection, it wasn't entirely unexpected. Essays are, by their nature, prone to the reader having the sense of them being artifacts of a moment in time. None of these essays are so personal as to make them timeless; nor are they about politics as practiced at the time they were written, or they would simply be irrelevant and/or uninteresting. Paterniti's essays touched, moved, and even amused me inside their own frame of reference. A high-satisfaction reading experience. show less

Michael Paterniti writes the kind of journalistic pieces and personal essays that have that slow, delicious build I relish. As with all great long-form writing, the experience depends on you being a good reader. In other words, you have to be willing to go the distance and stick around even when the story wanders, even when you the story seems to digress and lose its way, or when the author seems to break journalistic boundaries.

Love and Other Ways of Dying is a collection that showcases show more Paterniti’s best work published in Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and GQ. Collections should always be judged by the range demonstrated in the selected pieces and this collection doesn’t disappoint.

In the first story, “The Long Fall of Flight One-Eleven Heavy,” Paterniti writes about the disaster that met New York-bound Swissair Flight 111 as it went down off the coast of Nova Scotia. The reporting is cinematic. Paterniti tells the story from different perspectives: the coroner called to the scene, a TV reporter, the father of one of the passengers. The facts that are thrown to us are visceral. At one point, Paterniti writes how the impact of a plane crash “degloves” the human body, stripping flesh from bone and scattering organs on the water. It is the kind of showstopping story that you read and never shake long after you’ve turned the page. You read what a crash of that magnitude does to the human body and it becomes a barometer for the emotional devastation that follows.

We meet a widow torn asunder by the grief, who talks about reassembling her husband’s hand as she receives a finger or thumb from crash investigators. Families get belongings: clothing and toys picked up from the water. A husband and wife make promises to “stop their imaginations at that place where their daughter had boarded the plane, their minds would not wander past that particular rope.” Paterniti hops from one point of view to another, giving us backstories, giving us that stripped, innocent moment before the catastrophic moment: “Like lovers who haven’t yet met or one-day neighbors living now in different countries, tracing their route to one another, each of them moved toward the others without knowing it. … Do you remember the last time you felt the wind? Or touched your lips to the head of a child? Can you remember the words she said as she last went, a ticket in hand?”

Paterniti walks the line of literary nonfiction and elevated journalism.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are really personal stories that feel small, intimate, vibrating with a range of emotions—wonder, love, guilt, and regret—and secrets revealed. In the travel piece, “Never Forget,” Paterniti travels to Cambodia. He writes about the Khmer Rouge and his experience walking the haunted halls of Tuol Sleng, the prison camp where about 15,000 people were tortured and killed. Hard, brutal, and disconcerting. There is a moment where Paterniti meets one of the seven survivors who expresses remarkable sympathy when pondering the guard who tortured him. It floors him.

The collection in Love and Other Ways of Dying ranges in its stories but reveals two of Paterniti’s preoccupations: love and death. He writes: “The more willing we are to suffer pain and loss and even great throes of happiness, to live fully inside these big emotions, the closer we come to—what? The folded hands of the universe? Our humanity? Infinity? It must be something.”

Watch out for the high body count from plane crashes, earthquakes, and other disasters, but especially air disasters. “It’s possible that our most religious moments occur in airports rather than in churches … Apprehension, longing, and the fear of complete disintegration—what palpably animates an airport full of passengers about to take to heaven at the speed of sound—is what drives us to our gods.”

I hope magazine journalism stays strong. We need more stories that go big, more stories that dive deep and celebrate every corner of the human experience. show less

This book took me a long time to finish and at the same time, it is one to savour. It literally appeals to the senses: the views of Castile, the sounds of the stories in the telling room, the smell of the fertilizer, the heat of the day and, of course, the taste of one of the world's most exclusive cheeses.
When I settled in the book, I wanted it to last with its meandering tale, unexpected turns and profound love of the land and the people. I'm glad I stuck it through and I will carry it for show more a long time. show less

"The key to the telling room was a conical piece of metal, an artifact, it seemed, from Middle Earth. Because of its weight, I had to steer it with two hands into the lock . . . Up five steps was the telling room itself, with its white stucco walls, benches and a table, and the musty smell of hay and wet clay. When I threw open the shutters, the sun and warmth surged, bringing it to life."

In [The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese] the show more author, [[Michael Paterniti]], shares with us tales from a small Spanish village that has had worldwide impact. His 10 year odyssey is triggered while working at an Ann Arbor deli, as he becomes fascinated by the world's greatest piece of cheese, Páramo de Guzmán, a famous hard sheeps milk cheese made in a small Castile village in north central Spain. His fascination eventually leads him to the village to meet the cheese's maker, the fabulous, larger than life storyteller Ambrosio. As Ambrosio spins his tales and shares his philosophy of life in the telling room, we learn he has been the victim of a terrible betrayal, which has filled him with a lust for revenge but hasn't dampened his voracious appetite for life.

His family, like others, makes its own cheese, its own wine. "Ambrosio had a memory of eating his family's cheese as a child, and even now could conjure its sharp tang and the images associated with it: his mother's kitchen, with its gas fires and simmering pots of milk, and the bodega shelves where it was stored - in each case surrounded by people, warmth, the past. As he understood it, the family cheese had been made for so long there'd never been a written recipe." After many failures, he combines all the necessary aspects to recreate that cheese, and it begins to "star at agricultural fairs", then to win awards in Spain, then international awards, and in time became so highly sought after it even turns up across the world in the gourmetAnn Arbor deli Zingerman's. All the while Ambrosio is preaching his gospel of slow eating, avoiding processed, industrialized food, and observing the "old ways." "Perhaps in the United States you don't know what it's like to have old flavors, flavors from the past, from centuries before. But we live with them every day here."

The author becomes understandably infatuated with Ambrosio, and eventually convinces his wife to move with his small children temporarily to Guzmán. Soon they also are captivated by Ambrosio and the village. "{T}here was no TV, no house projects, fickle cellphone coverage, and it took forty-five minutes to reach an Internet cafe. Without all the distractions, we quickly became reacquainted with each other, taking long walks, lingering over meals, sharing observations or delighting in some little thing our kids did . . ." Paterniti, however, struggles to complete the book, as one story after another carries him away into intoxicating digressions. The book is filled with wonderful footnotes, many humorous, about local and Spanish history and the author's travails. One of my favorites involves his tongue in cheek supposed lack of curiosity about a mysterious tattoo on his wife's ankle, the meaning of which she has sworn, along with other members of her girl gang, not to disclose. Another involves the author being reminded, while standing in a huge field of sunflowers, of a ridiculous Peter Gabriel performance. When Gabriel, without telling his band, took the stage as "Flower Man - floppy petals framing his pale, painted face" one of his laconic bandmates, upon seeing Gabriel "creeping on stage with his flute" simply said, "Oh, bloody hell."

Will the world's greatest piece of cheese be saved? Will Ambrosio get his revenge? Will [[Paterniti]] finish the book? Oh yeah, we know the answer to the last one. He did finish it, and it's a treat to read. show less