Cut It Out

"Cutouts" is a piece by Constance Hale, which seems a bit out of place in a book entitled, The Best Travel Writing of 2006. It's certainly a very different type of travel piece, not really feeling like a travel piece at all but rather a personal narrative of an experience that occurred while traveling, the focus isn't actually the travel itself. The piece doesn't really describe Italian culture and because of its lack of educational information it seemed like it was slightly lacking purpose. That being said it's not bad writing, it just seems misplaced in a travel anthology. The writing itself is actually very clear-voiced and makes good use of symbolic details. Like when describing the building of Aldo's house; "Aldo had built the stone house by hand, and during a hiatus in the building project, a spider had spun a web in the valley between two stones. Aldo couldn't bear to destroy the web, so he placed a glass behind the spider and kept building". These are the kind of symbolic details that I thought made the piece interesting and showed that with a bit of editing it could have been made into a very insightful, useful travel piece. However, it would have been more fulfilling if it had provided a better sense of time and place.

The description of her "not-lover" Aldo is interesting and peaks my interests about him but I think it would have been better if she described more of their mentor/mentee relationship, teaching the reader about the artistic culture and perhaps something of the culture in general through her learning from him. When she describes Aldo's take on art and its imperfections I think that could have been further developed into something very telling about Italian culture and their version of beauty; "For imperfection, Aldo insisted, was the soul of art. To him, a perfect painting was merely decorative. A bit of watercolor out of control - or the self-doubt I couldn't escape - suggested Truth, Life, the Human Condition". I think in addition to providing more information it also would have provided a new perspective for the reader and allowed us to see things through her eyes in a useful way. I think this kind of information would have been more applicable instead of some of the unessecary personal and background details that were included.