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Richard Badalamente A Cat in Florence
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Jack Dann The Memory Cathedral
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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 (see 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 Giuseppe, 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 intro animation foot?) With warm thanks to Alan Fisk for finding my site and sending me a copy of his mighty fine book. |
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Thomas
Harris Hannibal
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Villa Triste |
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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
Nancy
Huston Henry
James |
Mary
Hoffman
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Christobel Kent |
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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 |
A
Time of Mourning 1 And here, with the introduction of her own detective, the author plunges properly into crime-series territory. The detective is called Sandro Cellini, he's an ex-cop (he appeared in A Florentine Revenge) 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. A Fine and Private Place 2 The second Sandro Cellini novel finds him underemployed and not overjoyed at his wife's improving career, involving as it does her spending more time on trips with her smooth brown boss. Following a teenage girl whose parents are suspicious isn't making for job satisfaction, when an accident up at an artistic retreat in a castle provides Sandro with a job more demanding. We see life at the prison-like castle first through the eyes of a new employee called Cate. The picture painted of the festering atmosphere of suspicion and artistic nerves within is authentic and clammy. It's like a country-house murder mystery, but with characters even more brittle, but breathing and believable, as we expect from CK. The air fairly seethes in the guest rooms and the kitchen, with the hints and suspicions of the first 100 pages then becoming revelations and twists. The winter setting adds festive sparkle to Florence and a sharp snowy bleakness to the more rural settings. The long sequence of theories and confrontations leading to the truth at the end is a bit farcical, but you will, nonetheless, be unable to stop reading until the end, even if that means reading until 1.00 in the morning, says the voice of experience. Also: in this novel a character claims that the term for what one suffers when one misses Florence is 'dome-sickness'. I'd not heard this one before, and I suspect that it's made up (especially as it's said here to have been coined by Ghirlandaio, in whose lifetime the Duomo was freshly built) but I like it! The Dead Season 3 We begin by being introduced to our central characters: a beaten-up body on a roundabout, a woman called Roxana in a dead-end job at a small bank, and Sandro Cellini, involuntarily house-hunting. Cellini's detective business isn't exactly thriving, and it being a particularly dead and hot August doesn't help, so a pregnant woman whose man's disappeared counts as things looking up. Roxana in the bank has noticed that a regular - from the local porn cinema - hasn't been in to bank his takings today too. Are these things linked? As ever with Ms K the concentration here is on lives rather than deaths. And if I add that Cellini's wife is recovering well from her mastectomy, that the bank worker has a mother with borderline Alzheimer's, and that Cellini's assistant, Giuli, has got a new boyfriend and is feeling ill in the mornings you'll know that it's (dare I say?) female matters that again dominate. No bad thing, of course, but the strands can feel a bit smuggled in, bearing in mind that this is ostensibly a crime novel. When the body is found and the plot knots start to get truly tangled, though, the domestic details recede somewhat, only for the whole lot to come together in a rush of action and weather at the end. Florence breaths heavily and hotly all through, although this is a dingy and sweaty underbelly Florence, empty and gritty, rather than the gently glowing tourist version. You'll recognise the locations and the life-concerns and not dare resist caring and being swept along. A Darkness Descending 4 We begin with an unhappy young mother and a meeting in a disused church of a broadly green political group heartily sick of the existing order. The latter, truly timely, phenomenon is personified by Giuli, Cellini's assistant, adopted by him and his wife from a life on the streets and now mixing the political with the personal. Then Cellini's old partner's daughter decides it's time for a change of life. Matters move at a leisurely pace for the first quarter of the book, following the collapse of the green group's leader, and its hard to see where a crime might fit into these seemingly unconnected strands, mostly concerning women and their life choices. The focus is on the Oltrano district, the default area now for books about the lives of real Florentines. the Piazza Santo Spirito having the requisite real-lifeness in spades. The other plot centre is the area around the Botanical Gardens, San Marco and the University. As I say the strands seems too disconnected to become an eventual weave, but the Adam and Eve references build up, and a pleasingly unpredictable ending looms. The story is concerned far more with women than criminals, as ever in this series, but the grip on our (and the characters') emotions is as sure as ever. |
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Jane
Langton The
Dante Game |
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Andrew
Losowsky Paul
J. McAuley |
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Magdalen
Nabb |
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Death of an Englishman |
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The
Innocent Soho
Crime 2005 |
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There's a new separate page for books of photos of
Lost
Florence
