The Fall: A Father's Memoir in 424 Steps
By Diogo Mainardi
156 pages;
Other Press
The Ode to a Child That Will Bring You to Your Knees
Told in 424 short passages—a number that corresponds to
the number of painful, slow steps that it takes Diogo Mainardi's disabled son
Tito to walk from their apartment in Venice to the hospital that bungled his
young birth—this slim memoir astonishes with its raw honesty. As he
examines his child's cerebral palsy, the author lays bare his guilt over his
past flippant remarks about birth deformities, his fury over the negligence of
the doctors and his unexpected and dizzying adoration for Tito, which leads him
to move his family from Italy to Brazil so that Tito can walk without fear of
falling on the soft sand of Rio's beaches. Along the way, expect discourses on
Italian art history, the poems of Ezra Pound and the songs of Neil Young (whose
two kids also have cerebral palsy). A heartbreaking, brain-expanding hymn of
love by a father for his son.
— Leigh Newman
