Barrelhouse Reviews: The Traces by Mairead Small Staid
Reviewed by Grace Bialecki
Deep Vellum (A Strange Object) / November 2022 / 252 pp
Oh, the joy of being young, artistic, and in Europe—the infinite possibilities of any city, museum, or stranger. This thrill courses through Mairead Small Staid’s essay collection, The Traces. At age twenty, Staid spent a semester studying in Florence, and these memories connect the work’s eleven essays. By analyzing the author’s past with intellectual rigor, The Traces expands collegiate gallivanting into a discourse on happiness as a place with memory as its fickle guide.
The book opens with an epigraph from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.” To frame her work, Staid uses numerous quotes from the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, as well as Invisible Cities’ chapter titles. And, faithful to Calvino’s approach to cities, Staid’s descriptions of places she visits during her Italian sojourn are merely ways of encountering eudemonia—the study of happiness—and the slipperiness of time. Yes, these are ageless issues, but by connecting them to the piazzas of Florence, a visit to Michelangelo’s David, or a jaunt to Anacapri, Staid immerses the reader in her fresh, vivid inquiry.
The collection is both a travelogue of Italy and a catalog of philosophic and artistic ideas—the ones Staid explored during her time in Italy, and now, the ones she uses to scrutinize her memories of it. Staid writes from a decade after her semester abroad. Although she doesn’t mention further schooling, the wide-ranging constellation of her references proves she’s been studying, particularly on the subject of happiness, for reasons both intellectual and personal. In her first essay, Staid credits Florence for bringing her out of a chronic depressive episode: “My heart was light, yes, and my mind felt keen and shining…I found this feeling amid Florence’s cobblestoned streets and marbled squares, and to those streets and squares I gave the credit. If I could only stay here, I thought, I could stay happy.”
This line comes a mere five pages into the collection, and already, I am pleading, “Stay there. Stay happy.” Such is the power of Staid’s breathless prose and direct addresses to the reader. She pulls us into the semester spent in this marvel of a city with her friend, Annie, and love interest, Z. We too sit in the cafés rolling cigarettes and drinking espresso. And when she writes, “No one, wise reader, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it, but I hope you’ll indulge a little description nonetheless,” we gladly indulge her. Woven amid ideas and characters, her descriptions are just as lovely.
Of course, happiness is more than an Italian city, and Staid knows this. In her fourth essay, “Thin Cities,” she draws from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics and uses his foundation for her own definition: “Happiness is the endpoint and the race itself, the finished vessel and its firing. (I have arrived, am always arriving, have always not yet arrived, and never will.)” For better or worse, this idea epitomizes her relationship with Z and their unrealized romance. And with Staid’s scrutiny, Z turns from a love interest into a figure animating the pursuit of happiness—the destination she runs toward.
By merging a sentimental pursuit with an intellectual one, Staid frees herself from the preciousness of her crush and the veneer of those months. She twice quotes John Berger’s warning, “The past is not for living in.” This devotion to analyzing our histories, rather than dwelling on them, is a refreshing departure for a memoir.
Even when Staid delves into the neurosis of her desire, it’s with a benevolent wisdom, calling her attraction to Z “the kind that begins as a crush and continues: I’m crushed and crushed again.” It was hard not to smile at the page, as all the times my younger self felt exactly this came to mind. But Staid is more likely to analyze another text rather than her inner turmoil, and the first paragraph of her acknowledgements — a list of all the translators whose work she cites — is a testament to this intellectual rigor.
I found these connections deeply impressive. The Traces worked my mind in new ways as it followed fibers of art and philosophy that Staid so deftly weaves among her journeys. It was a delight to be reminded that there are questions worth exploring beyond the human dramas that play out in so many other works. As the book drew to a close, I was filled with the same satisfied fatigue as when leaving a vast museum—a bit disoriented by all the art, but trusting in the influx of new ideas.
Grace Bialecki is a performance poet, novelist, and literary coach. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Catapult and Epiphany Magazine, where she was a monthly columnist. She is the co-founder of the storytelling series Thirst, and the author of the novel Purple Gold (ANTIBOOKCLUB).