Santoro, Lara

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Santoro, Lara

PERSONAL:

Born in Rome, Italy.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Ranchos de Taos, NM, and Boston, MA.

CAREER:

Writer, journalist, and novelist. Worked as a journalist covering topics as famine, war, and the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

WRITINGS:

Mercy, Other Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to newspapers and periodicals, including Newsweek and the Christian Science Monitor.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lara Santoro is a journalist and novelist. Born in Rome, Italy, Santoro attended schools in the United States and France. As a journalist, she has focused on the many issues and travails that face Africa, from the numerous wars, to the ever-present threat of famine, to the devastating and rapidly spreading epidemic of AIDS. Throughout Africa, the disease "has killed millions and is killing millions more. That was the big story, to which the world was not paying much attention," commented Bob Mayer in the Sunday Magazine (Santa Fe, NM). Santoro "became frustrated that her stories did not change that." In response, she decided to try telling the story in a different way, and concentrated her efforts on the fictional work that became her first novel, Mercy.

The novel's narrator is Anna, a burned-out, depressed, alcohol-addicted, and procrastinating journalist who has almost destroyed her career through inattention and self-sabotage. Reporting on the ongoing traumas of Africa has taken a heavy toll on her, forcing her to retreat into destructive habits, overindulgence in alcohol, intermittent rage, and a sexual dalliance with two men. A perpetual sense of "threat and misery hangs over the pages as Anna goes on assignments which offer the reader vignettes of bribery, disease, poverty, violence and plenty of suffering," commented a Kirkus Reviews critic. Anna's requests to her editor for a transfer to another bureau are unsuccessful, causing her to sink ever deeper into professional and personal quicksand.

Anna is jolted out of her downward spiral when she meets a local woman named Mercy, a large, flamboyant, vivacious Kenyan woman who convinces Anna to hire her as a housekeeper. Described as a "giantess" stuffed into clothing too small for her towering frame, Mercy is a commanding presence in the novel. She becomes not only Anna's housekeeper, but her conscience as well. Mercy tries to convince Anna to avoid drinking and concentrate on her professional obligations to turn her stories in on time. She helps Anna pursue her reportage and locate contacts in some of the most poverty-stricken slums, allowing the journalist to experience direct contact with the troubles she often writes about. As Anna sees more and more of the ills that plague Africa, she also begins to see the good that coexists with the famine, poverty, war, and disease. Elsewhere, she makes the acquaintance of Father Anselmo, a Franciscan priest who has acted directly on his religious vows and has left his order to live among those who need his help in the Nairobi slum of Korogocho. Father Anselmo earns for himself a resigned acceptance of the way things are around him; he knows his efforts will not result in great relief of the suffering, but he is determined to offer what he can.

Tragedy strikes close to home for the characters in the novel when it is learned that Mercy has contracted AIDS. The disease causes her great suffering, compounded by the tremendous difficulty in acquiring effective drugs to combat the disease. After finally acquiring the needed medications through clandestine and not always legal means, Mercy regains her vitality and becomes an activist lobbying for greater access to AIDS drugs. She organizes marches and protests that demand cheaper medications and easier access for African women and children. Observing Mercy's troubles and unwavering spirit, Anna comes to accept the mission of the AIDS activists, adopting a cause that reenergizes her and resuscitates her career. Elsewhere, Father Anselmo helps Anna realize that it is not AIDS or poverty or famine that are the real evils in Africa; instead, the greatest problem facing the continent and its millions of inhabitants is the world's blindness to the well-documented problems that exist there.

Santoro "evokes the continent's everyday horrors and uncommon moments of grace in decidedly unsentimental prose," remarked a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Mayer called Mercy "a moving account of the almost unbelievable suffering and depredation this scourge virus is causing across most of that continent." Cathleen Medwick, writing in O, the Oprah Magazine, named the book a "gorgeously written novel." "Santoro doesn't presume to offer a solution to civil wars, AIDS, or poverty in Africa," observed Krista Walton in the Washington City Paper. "But she does remind us that the least we can do is open our eyes."