Annette's Take on The Wedding Officer

I liked The Wedding Officer on several different levels: the food, the love story, and the war story. First, I thought the novel was very thought provoking on the issue of what being “liberators” meant. Who were they liberating? How did soldiers treat the people who they were supposedly liberating? We saw kind soldiers and morally bankrupt soldiers. We saw women who prostituted themselves out of desperation, hunger, and fear. And we saw a few women who knew where a buck could be made and frankly embraced the concept of “being a whore”. We saw military policies which were well intentioned but could never succeed in their goals. And we saw horrific military policies (in particular the sending of prostitues to the german brothels) that were completely abhorrent to me. They were treating those women as chattel, objects, military weapons. Where was the humanity in liberating the Italians from the horrors of the Nazis???? I didn’t see them drafting US women as soldiers given them syphilis and sending them behind the lines. They essentially enslaved these womens as weapons. Not our finest hour.

I thought the book really got across the dehumanizing effects of war, occupation, liberation, etc. I think it was even more difficult to take because the first part of the book had the wonderful images of food and love and sexual attraction. These parts of the books celebrated the human condition whether they were british, Italian, or American.

The description of the trench warfare was very vivid and nightmarish. I could almost hear the mortars. The section when Livia ends up with the communist, I thought was necessary but a little contrived…it wasn’t as fleshed out as the rest. Although it did do the job as to why communism, at that moment, appealed so much to the Italians. The Nazis had walked all over them, Mussolini had failed them (initially), the Allies mistreated them (intentionally or unintentionally) and even nature seemed to have turned against them with the eruption of Vesuvius. The “tidiness” and “fairness” that communism supposedly offered must have seem like manna from heaven.

And finally I loved the exploration of food and love and sex. I loved the conversation they would have about food when it was really about intimacy and sex. Very clever. I loved that this stiff lipped british soldiers weaned on gray gravy, overcooked meat, and vegetables like mush could come to appreciate and savor REAL cooking.

I plan to make that simple pasta sauce when I get home from So Cal.

Then there is Alberto and what Livia decided to do with him in order to save his father? What do you think you would have done in that case? Where you father was dying and you felt you were to blame?

What other moral dilemmas did you see that made you think…what would I do? What could I do? What would I do differently?