According to her afterword, literal. The problem is that as far as I can tell she did it having written her way to each relevant inflection point so as to allow herself to be surprised by the results, which means that the novel may accurately reproduce the unpredictability of life in the Italian theater of WWII, but it has kind of no dramatic shape. That said, I also like much of A Thread of Grace; it involves Jewish Italian partisans.
no subject
According to her afterword, literal. The problem is that as far as I can tell she did it having written her way to each relevant inflection point so as to allow herself to be surprised by the results, which means that the novel may accurately reproduce the unpredictability of life in the Italian theater of WWII, but it has kind of no dramatic shape. That said, I also like much of A Thread of Grace; it involves Jewish Italian partisans.