I first heard of Chiara Barzini’s novel, Things that Happened Before the Earthquake, on the Los Angeles Review of Books podcast. Like a trip through a foreign country the novel has some rough passages and its beautiful passages that makes you stop and linger at the stunning landscape of sentences. Sometimes it distorts time, place, and distance the way memory does in recollection, as if the sheer emotional weight creates its own gravity on the events. Barzini’s novel succeeds in winding us through the teenage Italian immigrant Eugenia’s experiences of sex, violence, and drugs as she navigates her life between the L.A. riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake, its aftermath, and into the California light that transforms smog, dirt, and haze into gold.
