Excerpt from The Invisible Mountain by Carolina De Robertis, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One night, at the brothel, Diego shattered a chandelier and two wooden chairs. He was thrown from the building and told not to return. The next night, at his father's insistence, Ignazio brought their gondola to dock at the brothel's steps.

"Come with me."

Ignazio shook his head.

His father stepped onto land, drunk, unsteady. He banged the brass ring against the gilded door. He yelled that he would enter. Three guards came out and punched him and then dragged him down the steps. They pushed him into the gondola, which swayed beneath the pressure.

Diego said, "You can't—"

"Shut up," a guard snarled. Ignazio could not see his face; his massive silhouette turned toward Ignazio. "Can't you control your father? For God's sake. For your family name."

Ignazio felt a hot and creeping slime beneath his skin. He longed to leap into the dark canal and swim very far and never come back. He nodded and pushed the gondola out onto the water.

Six months later, on a cold winter night, Diego cracked his wife's skull against the wall and loped outside. The canal growled under the wind. From the window of his room, Ignazio saw his father's shadow teeter on the edge of the canal, then fall as if thrown from an invisible fist.

Ignazio lay silent until he heard his sister-in-law's cry from the kitchen—dead, dead, Mamma is dead. He closed his eyes. His mother flooded across his mind: embracing him at six years old when he'd scraped his knee, her thick breasts covering his ears so that they filled with sounds like the inside of a shell; humming, tenor-low, while kneading dough for gnocchi in the kitchen; watching him as he put his coat on with his brothers, flesh swollen around her eyes. His chest burned. If his father had not thrown himself into the water, Ignazio could have killed him with bare hands. He heard Nonno sit up in the bed across from his.

"Eh? What happened?"

Ignazio spent the next five hours cleaning blood from the walls and the body.

Two days later, Diego's body washed up at the front steps of a count whose gondola order had never been completed. He surfaced just in time to make the journey to San Michele with his wife.

The corpses crossed the water, thronged by the living. The sky was pale with shock. A fleet of mourners—sons, daughters, wives and husbands, children, great-aunts, uncles, drenched in black—rode their gondolas in an entourage behind the coffins. San Michele loomed before them, with its township of tombs, soaking in the prayers and wails that ebbed over the water.

Ignazio rowed numbly. The world was not the world but a mere painting of itself; apart; impenetrable; all the grieving people only brushstrokes; he in the midst of it, pretending to be real, wearing a life of someone else's making. Only Nonno Umberto still seemed viscerally true. His breath labored as they disembarked, audible through the drone of Hail Marys. He leaned on Ignazio's arm. He smelled of soap and vinegar and a bitter trace of sweat.

Sepulchral rows, priestly mutterings, aunts weeping, slate moved aside to lower caskets into ground. Ignazio watched the remains of his parents (man and wife, he thought, killer and killed) sink slowly, together, into the dark. The stone slab groaned as his brothers pushed it back into place, shutting in the dead.

"Ignazio," his grandfather said. "Take me for a walk."

They escaped the praying crowd and walked the cobbled path. The tombs of the rich loomed around them, edifices twice the size of the Firielli kitchen, wrought with statues. Sylphs and ancient gods and grieving angels gazed their way. They moved past them to a row of simple tombs, unadorned boxes submerged in the ground. Nonno stopped at one of them. Ignazio read the names etched into marble: porzia firielli. donato firielli. armino firielli. rosa firielli. eracla firielli. isabella firielli. He chanted them, one after the other, in his mind, Porzia, Donato, Armino, Rosa, Eracla, Isabella, his aunts, his uncles, frozen children, unknown ghosts.

Excerpted from The Invisible Mountains by Carolina De Robertis Copyright © 2009 by Carolina De Robertis. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.