Advent 2024: Inner and Outer Journeys
The Prison of the Self
A promising young writer’s debut memoir is stifled by self-sabotaged attempts at transformation.
Review by David Priest
Allegedly, Zito Madu’s new book, The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, is a braided travelogue/memoir in which Madu wanders a Covid-empty Venice and ponders a fraught relationship with his father. I say allegedly, because the segments taking place in Venice lack the descriptive detail you’d expect in a travelogue, and the segments plumbing Madu’s memory lack the insight you’d expect in a memoir.
This isn’t a failure of the form; travel writing has long offered a wonderful route into the self, prompting questions about perception and meaning. Whether it’s Hunter S. Thompson visiting Louisville in Derby season, Charles Bowden visiting Mexico City in its most violent years, or Annie Dillard visiting her backyard in springtime, the sequence of travel, observation, and rumination is well-trod among brilliant writers.
Madu’s book breaks down at the observation stage. He did indeed travel to Venice, but we must, it seems, take his word that “there is something magical about traveling the Ponte della Libertá,” or that walking the streets of an unpeopled Venice feels “fantastical” and “mythical,” because he never bothers to show us. This isn’t just technical nitpicking: without what author Charles Baxter calls the “bric-a-brac” of staging—that is, basic descriptive detail—no subtext can emerge. The book is only ever saying precisely what is written on the page, and never anything more.
It isn’t just physical detail that escapes Madu’s incurious gaze; it’s the detail of human emotion, in himself and others. Madu is often simplistic when describing emotions: “I was sad when the meal… ended,” and “the three of us sitting there… made me happy.” Elsewhere, attempting more profundity, he writes, “My mother is the first person who taught me to mistrust [my eyes],” because, as a child, he often put more food onto his plate than he could eat.
Where Madu does aim for nuance, his sentences (and thinking) become clumsy and hard to follow: “I won’t condemn myself for how much of the college experience I wasted, because back then, I was so angry I was being forced to go through that path, which I had such deep disdain for [sic] that I couldn’t force myself to simply do the bare minimum to get through it.” In this instance, you understand the basic sentiment, but such messy interrogations severely stunt the emotional core of the book—the complicated relationship between a strict immigrant father and a willful son.
He fails to notice that such freedom seemed to be his father’s intention from the start.
A refrain throughout The Minotaur is the “hatred” Madu’s father harbors for him. At least half a dozen times, he tells us his father hated him; yet, so many of his father’s actions are explicitly done out of love for his children (Madu included). The Nigerian immigrant, father of six and former tribal leader, works himself to humiliation, to exhaustion, and eventually to illness—all to give his children a chance at education and life in the United States. He even shaves his head to “save the ten-dollar cost of a haircut and instead spend it on his children.” And while he beats Madu several times throughout the story, it never reads as hatred, but rather as a frustrated father attempting, with misguided methods, to teach his son obedience.
Madu’s descriptions of this relationship feel careless. He insists multiple times that he never hated his father, even as he writes elsewhere, “I hated him because he hated me first.” Between this book and essays Madu has published over the years, details also differ. In one rendition of a story of unjust punishment, Madu’s father beat him with a belt after insisting—without evidence—that he had stolen money from his father’s wallet. In an essay some years ago, Madu wrote he couldn’t recall whether he stole the money. Here he says he stole it.
I don’t aim to fact check this book—and memoirs rarely offer reliable histories—but the messiness doesn’t serve any purpose here. Rather, it contributes to a feeling that Madu isn’t ready to make sense of his relationship with his father. In many cases, he comes across as petulant and un-self-aware. In better circumstances, he is patronizing: when his mother warns him “not to hold the anger [toward his father] too deeply,” he writes, “She wasn’t asking me to forgive him, but she was saying I should recognize I was, in a way, stronger than he was.” That’s quite the leap.
Madu isn’t entirely at fault here: to understand a flawed father is never simple. The poet Robert Hayden writes of “fearing the chronic angers” of his father—the same father who worked long days, who split wood to warm the house, who polished his son’s shoes. “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” he asks.
Zito Madu doesn’t get hung up on such contradictions in his father. He understands the older man only against the foil of Fathers as They Should (But Do Not) Exist, cannot see him as a whole man—as an imperfect tenant of “love’s austere and lonely offices.”
What’s more, unlike Hayden—or, say, memoirist Jeannette Walls in her books examining complicated parent-child relationships—Madu never acknowledges that his father’s decisions, to deliver him and his five siblings to America, to work low-paying jobs for long hours, and even to discipline him too harshly, shaped him in any ways other than negative. He is endlessly oppositional: “At the end of it, I was the one who had my life. I was the healthy one, the one who traveled, the one who looked after himself. I didn’t need him.” He fails to notice that such freedom seemed to be his father’s intention from the start.
Here, in a memoir similarly framed around transformation, Madu seems bizarrely dead set against changing his.
Nearing the end of the book, Madu transforms into a Minotaur for about twenty pages. Yes, a literal Minotaur. It’s a surprising element in an otherwise straightforward book, formally speaking, and it’s meant to echo on some level the Minotaur narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’s classic short story “The House of Asterion.” Sadly, this segment of Madu’s book is forgettable, characterized by uninteresting language, shallow reflection, and a non-existent resolution. In fact, the digression seems almost completely disconnected from Madu’s emotional transformation a few pages later.
This second transformation, into a son who is able to “be of service to [my father], and to be of service to my mother and siblings”—despite his father’s imperfections—is the most interesting moment of the book. It’s the only inkling of change we see in Madu. Yet even this transformation is grudging and incomplete: Madu wishes he’d been better behaved as a child, but says such wishes are pointless “because I know if I were placed in the same situation again, even with the knowledge I have now, I would still behave the same way.” This echoes an earlier vignette, in which Madu describes fighting with an elementary school classmate: “Thinking about it today, I still wish I would have slammed his head against the metal to let him feel the same pain I did.” Here and elsewhere, Madu follows the same pattern: he relates an experience in his early life, describes his immature response, and without missing a beat, decides he is blameless and would repeat the mistake again given half a chance. Zadie Smith once published a collection of essays inspired by the idea of changing her mind. Here, in a memoir similarly framed around transformation, Madu seems bizarrely dead set against changing his.
I wanted to like The Minotaur at Calle Lanza. A Nigerian-American writer in Venice during the pandemic is an incredible snapshot of our globalized world, of the diversity of voice and culture available to curious readers with a few hours to spare. And as a writer myself, who also started off in magazine writing, and is also working on a first book, I felt a sort of kinship with Madu. And it’s that kinship, that respect for the incredible effort of producing a book and responsibility for publishing one, that motivates me in saying Madu’s debut is a failure.
More than a failure of craft (and The Minotaur at Calle Lanza, with countless structural, stylistic, and even grammatical blunders throughout, most certainly is), Madu’s memoir is emblematic of a moral failure so many of us over-self-examined young adults in the 21st century are in danger of: a failure to imagine ourselves as anything more than what we already are. When even as adults we still understand ourselves to be essentially children of our parents; when our anxiety more than our morality directs our imagination; when we fundamentally reject growth in ourselves or in those we love; in all these cases, we degrade our humanity. We transform ourselves not into better men or women, but instead into beasts.
David Priest is an award-winning Kentucky writer. His stories and essays have appeared in The American Literary Review, Salon, ABC, Flying Island, Ekstasis, and many other publications. He was recently nominated for Best of the Net 2025. When he isn’t hanging out with his family, he is at work on his first novel.
The Minotaur at Calle Lanza was released by Belt Publishing on April 2, 2024. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy from the publisher here.
