The castle of light

The Castle of Light is a novel that unravels, embraces, and ultimately celebrates the immigrant experience. It follows the story of Udito Arcana, a gifted young stonemason in the remote village of Castel di Luce in the Abruzzo Mountains of central Italy. Udito has an irrepressible talent for transforming raw stone into structural art, and his skills are reflected in dozens of small homes, walls, and churches scattered throughout the mountains. He also has a magical affinity with the landscapes that yield each stone, the lush beech forests that nurture his soul on long solitary sojourns, and particularly with the rare and elusive bears of Abruzzo that serve as his spiritual guides. But, when he brings his talents to nearby Rome he encounters a deep prejudice against his rural values, and a corruption that forces him to abandon his homeland in search of the promises of America. Settling in a still wild enclave outside New York City, Udito brings a family of six into the world, each eventually making a distinctive and sometimes destructive mark on the world around them, but each fully embracing their new “Americana” culture, while allowing their origins to fade and dissipate into something less than memory. It is only in the next generation when Lucio Arcana, grandson to a long gone Udito, finds himself drawn back to Castel di Luce, a place that exists only in story for him, where he rediscovers the only way to mitigate the emptiness in his soul. The Castle of Light is ultimately a saga of the roots of culture and nature that define each of us, and the risk to the resilience of the soul if that culture is diluted and lost. The novel challenges the concept of the “melting pot” of America where traditions are dissolved to create a bland mixture, and replaces it with a celebration of the cornucopia of cultures that keep us connected to the stories, journeys, and the earth that built us. Reclaiming these stories creates a shared immigrant experience that can sustain a resilient and diverse nation, and ultimately keep us connected to the entire earth.