The pull of the darkly irrational: it’s a fascinating theme, but Mazzantini doesn’t do it justice.
Can you imagine a love affair beginning with a rape? That’s the challenge an Italian actress/second-novelist sets herself in her American debut.
Timoteo is the top surgeon at his hospital in an unidentified Italian city. His teenaged daughter Angela is brought in after a traffic accident. Her desperate condition frames his confession of an affair he had 16 years earlier. It begins as the 40-year-old surgeon is traveling to join his beautiful, elegant wife Elsa at their beach house. His car breaks down in a squalid working-class neighborhood. A woman lets him phone for help from her house. She’s the wrong side of 30, somewhere between trashy and ugly, yet Timoteo, suddenly inflamed, moves into her “like a raptor in a captured nest.” When he returns later to apologize, she doesn’t seem angry, and he takes her again. Italia, a hotel chambermaid, has no surviving family. Her father abused her sexually when she was 11. She is filled with self-loathing: “Weeds are hard to kill,” she says of herself. Italia becomes an unlikely love object for Timoteo, whose father has recently died, leaving him an “orphan.” He never liked his father, who was also attracted to solitary, unattractive women. Is Timoteo simply repeating the pattern? Or is it slumming that’s the thrill? Mazzantini leaves us guessing. Italia becomes pregnant and goes to the gypsies for an abortion. Then Elsa becomes pregnant with Angela. Split down the middle, Timoteo joyously attends the birth of his daughter but then returns to Italia, who’s hemorrhaging from the botched abortion. After her drawn-out death and funeral, Timoteo goes back to Elsa, although his feelings for her have always blown hot and cold. She doesn’t remark on his absence, which is strange, but after the rape nothing in this novel has seemed altogether believable.
The pull of the darkly irrational: it’s a fascinating theme, but Mazzantini doesn’t do it justice.Pub Date: May 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51074-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More trite truthiness from Coelho.
A Swiss journalist strives to redress the meaninglessness of her life with even more meaningless sexual encounters in Coelho’s latest pseudo-philosophical screed.
Linda, a respected newspaper reporter in Geneva, is happily married to a handsome, wealthy and generous financier. The couple is blessed with beautiful and well-behaved children, at least from what we see of the progeny, which isn’t much. The vicissitudes of domestic life aren’t Coelho’s concern unless they offer a pretext for platitudes about the eternal verities and The Things That Matter. When she interviews Jacob, a former flame from school days who's now a rising politician, Linda behaves professionally right until she administers a parting blow job. The ensuing affair jolts Linda out of the low-grade depression she has been experiencing despite her enviable lifestyle. Her adulterous behavior disturbs her, however, since she can't explain her own motives. After briefly trying therapy, she consults a Cuban shaman, to no avail (except to generate a successful series of in-depth features on occult healing). Her bafflement is shared by the reader, who will be puzzled by the total lack of any convincing reason why she should be so infatuated with Jacob, who, in addition to being very thinly portrayed, apparently can’t decide whether his amorous strategy should be sensitive and romantic or something 50 or so shades greyer. After a close call—Jacob’s astute spouse almost exposes her—Linda decides that the fling isn't worth destroying lives over, as if these shallow existences were under any threat to begin with. Along the way to this realization, Coelho milks each opportunity to preach—by way of endless interior monologues, quotes from Scripture and talky scenes—sermons about love, marriage, sexual attraction, evolutionary theory and every other imponderable he can muster. Occasional interesting tidbits about the novel’s setting, the French-speaking Swiss canton of Vaud, are not enough to redeem the pervasive mawkishness.
More trite truthiness from Coelho.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-101-87408-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Intelligent, reflective, satisfying fiction from an old master.
Veteran Godwin’s latest (Grief Cottage, 2017, etc.) tracks a half-century friendship between two very different yet oddly compatible women.
The dean and dorm mistress of Lovegood College pair Feron Hood and Merry Jellicoe as roommates in 1958, hoping that sunny, outgoing Merry will be a steadying influence on Feron, who has recently lost her alcoholic mother and fled from an abusive stepfather. The girls do indeed form a lasting bond even though Merry leaves after a single semester to run the family tobacco farm when her parents are killed in a plane crash. They have both taken their first steps as writers under the guidance of Literature and Composition teacher Maud Petrie, and during their mostly long-distance relationship, Feron will be goaded to write three novels by Merry’s occasional magazine publications; she is at work on a fourth about their friendship as the book closes. The two women rarely meet in person, and Feron is bad about answering letters, but we see that they remain important in each other’s thoughts. Godwin unfolds their stories in a meditative, elliptical fashion, circling back to reveal defining moments that include tragic losses, unexpected love, and nurturing friendships. Self-contained, uncommunicative Feron seems the more withholding character, but Merry voices one of the novel’s key insights: “Everyone has secrets no one else should know” while Feron reveals essential truths about her life in her novels. Maud Petrie and Lovegood dean Susan Fox, each of whom has secrets of her own, continue as strong presences for Feron and Merry, who have been shaped by Lovegood more enduringly than they might have anticipated. Feron’s courtly Uncle Rowan and blunt Aunt Mabel, Merry’s quirky brother Ritchie, devoted manager Mr. Jack, and a suave Navy veteran with intimate links to both women are among the many nuanced characters drawn by Godwin with their human contradictions and complexities on full display. A closing letter from Dean Fox movingly reiterates the novel’s conjoined themes of continuity and change.
Intelligent, reflective, satisfying fiction from an old master.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63286-822-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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