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Alan
Fisk Cupid
and the silent goddess
Giuseppe
is apprentice to mannerist painter Bronzino and also the model
for two of the figures in his famous
Allegory
with Venus and Cupid.
The painting (right)
which is
in the National
Gallery in London is a beguiling and dense mix of figures and
meanings that are far from certain. This novel tells the story of
its commission and creation, with the main focus on the
apprentice and his attachment to Angelina, the model who sits for
Venus. She is a silent beauty whose smiles entrance but whose
mind is a thing of mystery. Bronzino is seen through the
eyes of Giusseppe, forced to be the object of his master's lusts
when he is not slaking them with his own master Pontorno, and so
he doesn't come out of this story well. He's painted as an
evil-tempered and vain rapist of young boys, which is not the
line Vasari takes, to say the least. The facts of history are
played with, of course, but it's a believable tale which never
jars or drags, and which is full of convincing inventions and
fragrant details, like the mysterious Angelina responding
positively to strong smells, whether pleasant or not. The plot is
not complex, but there are well-drawn characters that you'll care
for and the times are fully and colourfully evoked.
(And
did you know that the foot in the lower-left-hand corner of the
painting (right)
is the Monty Python foot?)
With
warm thanks to Alan
Fisk for finding my site and sending me a copy of his mighty
fine book.
Michele
Giuttari A
Florentine Death
Well,
I tried, I really did. I managed to get past the flat and
cliché-ridden prose, the unconvincing dialogue and the
very ordinary characters. Also the fact that the lack of any
descriptive talent was doing Florence no favours. I wasn't
enjoying the book hugely but I was persevering, for your sake.
But then on page 107 the cops recover a Velazquez painting and
our hero is impressed by how its eyes follow him around the room.
I'm sorry but, as has been said before and often, life is too
short. Also a friend who managed to finish it had warned me that
the lesbian character gets anally raped later on and enjoys it,
and that there's also some gratuitous Thomas Harris-style stuff,
what with the gruesome torture implements and the man-eating
wolves. If this sounds like the sort of thing that you'd enjoy
then be my guest. But not in my house.
Much
was made in the publicity material about Giuttari being involved
in the Monster of Florence case, thereby making us feel we have
to respect him for his real-life crime fighting. Imagine my joy
then, watching a TV documentary about the case recently, at
discovering that he was, in fact, one of those taken in by the
utterly foolish black magic theories. The doc mentioned his
criminal convictions for lying under oath too, and how he had a
journalist arrested for pointing out his stupidity. It's somehow
reassuring that my deep dislike for this book is born out by his
turning out to be actually pretty much a dishonest hindrance to
the solving of this case.
More
about the documentary here
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Brian
Glanville Along
the Arno
Three young
exiles wash up in post-war Florence. The blurb talks of a lost
generation and a web of love, violence and frustration... but I
intend to read it one day, honest.
Thomas
Harris Hannibal
The sequel to
Silence of the Lambs sees the escaped Doctor Lecter establishing
himself as an academic in Florence. With his wine expertise and
love of the finest things he's like a dark-side James Bond, and
the constant harping on his perfect refinement can get a little
wearing. He displays the depth of his knowledge, and so
gets to be the custodian of a grand palazzo - just like that -
and we get shown some of the sights. The descriptions are loving,
the detail convincing, and a corrupt policeman called Pazzi gets
done in like his renaissance ancestor, as punishment for trying
to help kill the bad Doctor. Florence's own serial killer, the
Monster, as featured in Magdalen Nabb's novel,
gets a look in too. For his final showdown with Clarice he has to
leave Florence, and then the gruesomeness really begins.
Engrossing. There is a film
too.
Robert
Hellenga
The
sixteen pleasures
A
book about a young American woman called Margot and her first
time in Florence. She's come to help rescue the books
damaged in the flood of 1966. It's a fragrant story of
books, buildings, love and frescoes, and the effect the famous
flood has on all of them. In a nutshell,
'swelling' seems to just about cover it.
(Also
The
fall of a sparrow:
a truly affecting tale dealing with love, loss and the whole
human thing. A classics lecturer learns to deal with the death of
his daughter when a terrorist bomb in Bologna takes her life, and
changes those of all of her family. Not Florence-related in the
slightest, except a couple of mentions, but a very warm
recommendation nonetheless.)
The
Italian Lover
And
then, 12 years after The
Sixteen Pleasures, comes
this sequel, in which the original book's heroine is approached
by people wanting to make a film of the story told in that book,
which in this book was written by her and published in 1975. (My
sparse review above is because I wrote it in the first months of
this site, and a few years after having read the book.) The
action takes place in 1990 and Margot is now 53 and ready for a
change. It may come from the film, or it may come in the form of
a blues-guitar-playing classics professor whose daughter was
killed in the Bologna train bombing. Plots and lives intertwine,
with lots of authentic Italian and film-business detailing, and
much criss-crossing of the streets of Florence. But it's the
emotional involvement that keeps them pages turning - each
character's trials and choices make you care about them and how
their lives are going to develop. Like life, or a soap, but in a
good way, a very good way.
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John Spencer Hill
The
last castrato
The
first chapters of this novel could once be found here
- they got you past some off-putting purple passages and a couple
of errors (like calling works by Leonardo da Vinci 'da Vincis',
rather than 'Leonardos') and into the story. Hill's detective is
another sensitive loner - an unmarried writer of poetry - but
from unoriginal soil springs fresh life, with some believable and
likeable characters and a sharp plot. There are clever but
unobtrusive allusions that'll make you feel smart if you get
them. You will know the identity of the murderer pretty early on,
though, if you know anything about castrati, and putting the word
castrato in the title also spoils what could've been a shocking
revelation. The pacing works well by interspersing the murder
stuff with the experiences of Cordelia - an American woman who's
just dumped her unworthy husband to come to Florence to write her
doctoral thesis and rediscover herself. She develops as the plot
develops and her story is so perceptively written you might
almost suspect Mr Hill of being a Ms.
Mary
Hoffman
Stravaganza
- City of Flowers
The
first book in the Stravaganza series
City
of Masks was
set in Venice and I loved it. I haven't read the second one, set
in Siena, but got this sent to me as an advance uncorrected proof
(my first!) to review, after Ms H herself made contact. It has
characters from the previous two books, and new ones, hopping
back and forth from Renaissance Florence to 21st Century North
London.
The plot hangs upon the impending marriage of
various members of the fictionalised Medici family and the
trouble expected, in the Pazzi conspiracy vein. Florence is very
well evoked, fictionalised or not, with some nice changes - like
Michelangelo being female - and other 'in-joke' touches for us
fans to spot. And the flood towards the end is a scene not soon
forgotten. I enjoyed this book but found it less emotionally
engaging and more romantic and, if you'll pardon the expression,
girly than the first one. (If I had a pound for every time
someone blushed...I'd have more than twenty pounds, I imagine. )
But I'm no teenager, and not a girl, and so maybe I'm not this
book's target audience. That's not to say there's not plenty to
give pleasure to Florence fans here, and it still has the
sharpness and humanity I enjoyed in the first one and so gets a
warm recommendation. And which of us can say we wouldn't be
better people if we were more in touch with a our inner (teenage)
woman?
Henry
James
The
diary of a man of fifty
A
short story in which a man (of fifty) returns to Florence, from
which city he fled twenty-five years before, from a relationship
with an alluring woman that would, he thinks, have only made him
miserable had he remained. He meets a young man in a similar
situation, but the woman is the daughter of his long-dead lost
love. Old ground is gone over, new facts emerge, and history
fails to repeat itself, maybe. A subtle and complex little tale,
which subtly whiffs of Florence, without too much
sight-seeing.
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Christobel
Kent
A
party in San Niccolo
Well,
after a pretty lean period for new novels set in Florence comes a
real gem. There's a murder, or two, but this is not really a
crime novel. It's more a book of characters and the way their
lives connect, which is a major theme in crime novels, of course,
but the story here isn't of police and procedure. The main
character is Gina, an Englishwoman who's finding motherhood a
little limiting, to say the least, and escapes to stay in
Florence at the austere home of an old school friend and her
austere and disturbing architect husband. The first murder victim
is a friend of her hosts' daughter. As Gina socialises and shops
and goes to stay in the country the death and the subsequent
investigation intrudes on, and affects, the lives of the people
she meets in different ways, and these people in turn meet
others... The young people contemplate their messy lives as
the old people look back at their messy pasts. As the week
progresses, the plot thickens as preparations are made for the
party of the title (uncannily echoing the plot of Mrs
Dalloway which I read just before this book.) Florence and
its tacky high life and lurid low life are described and evoked
with telling detail and conviction, and the characters convince
and breathe. An exceptionally good book.
A
Florentine revenge
And
there's no dip in quality here, just an impressive shift of
territory. This one slips effortlessly over into crime-novel
concerns, with the murder of a man suspected of murdering a child
years earlier keeping pace with the initially seemingly
disconnected lives and clients of a British tour guide and a
woman working in a swanky frock shop. It was often a bit
over-girly for me, to be honest - lot's of lingering descriptions
of posh frocks and shoes, and the appearance and glamour of the
female characters generally, especially the rich man's wife,
whose smallness and cuteness is emphasized every time she
appears. There's also an an annoying reliance on cliff-hanger
switches between the different characters' stories, with these
tense hands-around-throat moments too often turning out to be red
herrings. But these are small criticisms of a novel whose
converging strands drag you in, and Florence is - cliché
alert! - a character in itself here, so lovingly are it's glowing
art and gloomy streets evoked. The dark and smelly underbelly of
the city is just as well evoked as the shiny and tourist-infested
surface. Truly a Florentine and narrative treat.
A
Time of Mourning
And
here, with the introduction of her own detective, the author
plunges properly into crime-series territory. The detective is
called Sandro Cellini, and he's an ex-cop. But he's only just
decided to become a private investigator, so this is his first
job, or first two jobs. He's initially asked to look into the
suicide of an elderly architect, whose wife cannot believe he'd
do such a thing. Later he's drawn into the novel's other plot
strand - the disappearance of a flirty art student, which her
less worldly fellow-student flatmate spends a fair few chapters
investigating before the girl's mother calls on Sandro. The
strand with the searching student is enlivened by her learning
some rather sudden life-lessons as she learns about her friend's
life. There's also more of the girly and fashion stuff which I
couldn't relate to in the Florentine
Revenge and
the reliance on cliffhanger chapter endings remains too. But only
the need to eat and sleep stopped me reading this book, as it
sweeps you in and along in effortless fashion - these are
undoubtedly human beings here undergoing these life-churning
events and you care what happens to them. The Florence it gives
us is good and darkish and real, although the Santo
Spirito/Boboli locations are not exactly fresh for Magdelen Nabb
fans. But for the slightly grimier side of Florence and the dusty
parkland where murders can happen where you gonna go? Lots of
rain too, and a climactic flood of almost-biblical proportions
which brings up all the 1966 stuff again.
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