Mercury Pictures Presents

Anna’s miniature model of Mercury Pictures provides the opening image of the novel and introduces some of its main themes and concerns. Marra contrasts the proportioned, egalitarian overview of the scale model to Hollywood’s fondness for the close-up—for favoring one perspective over another. The mixture of nationalities and social classes represented in the mirror reflects the novel’s ongoing concern with “bit players,” individuals on the margins of history whose stories are seldom told. The outlook of the miniature is mirrored in the shifting narrative perspective of the novel. No character is so minor as to be excluded.

The miniature is also a vehicle for wish fulfillment. By recreating the city she left behind, Anna experiences a god-like sense of detachment and control that forms a welcome antidote to the chaos and pain of her real life, where she is constantly at the mercy of historical forces beyond her control. It is a way for her to reclaim and repossess what she lost.

However, the god-like vision of the miniaturist acquires darker connotations when Anna is invited to recreate her miniatures on a larger scale at the Dugway Proving Ground. The bird’s-eye view of the miniaturist who creates the city is appropriated by the bombers set to destroy it.

The legendary tomb of the Visigoth emperor Alaric in Cosenza is one of the novel’s central motifs. Legend has it that Alaric was buried, together with the spoils of his sack of Rome, under the Busento River. To keep the tomb’s location a secret, the prisoners who dug the tomb were slaughtered and buried with the emperor.

Alaric’s hoard attracts numerous treasure seekers to the banks of the Busento, including a Nazi expedition headed by Himmler. The Nazis and fascists see the tomb as a political symbol of national prestige as well as a potential source of material wealth. However, Alaric’s loot is not the only treasure being sought in the Busento. After Michele’s death by suicide, Ferrando searches desperately for his body:

His body was never discovered, but Ferrando bought a row boat and for months searched up and down the Busento, a tomb robber, a treasure hunter, searching for the resting place of Michele, the only body in the Busento worth recovering, the boy from Genoa who conjured snow in August (149).

For Ferrando, Michele’s is “the only body in the Busento worth recovering” (395). When she learns of her son’s death, Concetta, too, desperately digs for his body on the riverbank. However, the only “treasure” to emerge from the river is Nino when he is saved from drowning by Giuseppe.

When Maria and Annunziata return to San Lorenzo, Annunziata reflects on the fate of the prisoners buried in Alaric’s tomb, in another example of the novel’s preoccupation with “bit players.” Annunziata is scornful of the historically famous Alaric and instead feels compassion for the marginalized, anonymous “bit players” in his story:

Who lay in that underworld below her rippling eyes? What were their names? She tried to imagine the numberless souls who diverted the river, who dug Alaric’s tomb, who laid his plunder in the riverbed, who were slaughtered and buried in the tomb they built, and if history remembered them at all, it remembered oy how they died. What justice exists in a world where villains enjoy the afterlives their victims are denied? There is no justice, not for bit players, not in this or any other world (406).

The novel includes two references to snowfall. First, Ferrando recalls Michele sending sugar flying up in the air whilst playing with a fan at the factory in Genova. Second, when Anna and Vincenzo step outside the studios in the “Blackout” section, they are surprised to see that it has snowed in Los Angeles “for the first time in a decade” (252). In both cases, snow is presented as something miraculous—as a source of wonder and gratitude. Ferrando sees Michele’s lost resting place as more precious than Alaric’s because he “conjured snow in August” (149). Having railed against societal expectations for “gratitude” from refugees, Anna experiences a “moment of gratitude” when she sees snow flurries settling on the palm trees (252).