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Nothing surprises us in dreams, Jean Cocteau said. But LEFT-HANDED DREAMS (Delphinium, $20), Francesca Duranti's new novel, is both full of surprises and a dream of a book; it never stops awakening you to the world. It begins in Italy, the country where Martina Satriano was born and to which she has returned to visit her ailing mother. Alas, at the very moment Martina's plane from New York touches down, her mother dies and Martina spends the rest of the novel pondering what she calls "destiny's perfect timing." |
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Finished just as Eastern Europe was getting ready to shuck off communist rule, Francesca Duranti's gently satiric novel, "Personal Effects" (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli; Random House, 152 pages, $19), presciently describes the mentality ofa post-Cold War world in which communism is no longer a real threat and the spiritual shortcomings of a consumerist culture are already creating ambivalence. Ms. Duranti's naive heroine, Valentina Barbieri, is a lost soul in more ways than one. After 10 years of marriage, her husband, Riccardo, a well-known author of a popular series of "secular, irreverent biographies -- of the Church Fathers", has left her for someone more glamorous. |
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A mouse-like scratching from the entrance of her Milan apartment leads Valentina to fling open the door. Her just-divorced husband, Riccardo, is removing the nameplate with a tiny screwdriver. Only his name is on it, of course; and once he screws it into the door of the apartment across town that he shares with his new wife, Valentina will have been erased. Francesca Duranti's novella, as wryly melancholy as the voice of her protagonist, searches out the philosophical notion of identity and hasn't far to look. For Valentina, identity is things, the "personal effects" of the title. "One must have in order to be" is her gloss on Descartes' formula. |
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A mouse-like scratching from the entrance of her Milan apartment leads Valentina to fling open the door. Her just-divorced husband, Riccardo, is removing the nameplate with a tiny screwdriver. Only his name is on it, of course; and once he screws it into the door of the apartment across town that he shares with his new wife, Valentina will have been erased. Francesca Duranti's novella, as wryly melancholy as the voice of her protagonist, searches out the philosophical notion of identity and hasn't far to look. For Valentina, identity is things, the "personal effects" of the title. "One must have in order to be" is her gloss on Descartes' formula. |
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Francesca Duranti's new novel takes place on an estate in Tuscany, but her characters -- at least when it comes to their complicated sexual lives -- might easily have been imported from Updike country, with visas stamped by Iris Murdoch. Second-generation beneficiaries of a paper-mill fortune, the aristocratic Santini family -- the matriarch, Violante; her long-widowed daughter-in-law, Lavinia; her son Leopoldo and his American wife, Cynthia -- have a lavishly furnished life. There's at least one Ferrari, as well as ranks of devoted servants delivering many breakfasts in bed. And then there is the estate itself-- composed of three handsome old villas, with a swimming pool and a rose garden, set in parklike grounds at the base of a gently sloping hill. |
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Our lives are not books, of course, but they too need their pages turned. Sometimes, like the characters in a novel, we are unable to reach out and do it ourselves. And then, however brilliant the page may be, it goes stale. Dostoevsky could write the Grand Inquisitor scene, but it is the ordinary, much less splendid reader who turns the page when it is over, and goes on to the next chapter. Stage hands, in a sense, are as important as the actor playing Hamlet.
The carousel's prancing horses would lose all grace without the mechanism that ratchets them off along the circle that takes them away and brings them back. |
A novel of ideas and emotions, "The House on Moon Lake," winner of three prestigious literary prizes in Italy, has three parts - "Fulvia", "Maria" and "Petra" - each representing a woman viewed from the perspective of the male protagonist, Fabrizio Garrone.
The morning Fabrizio finished doing a translation, he heard a song of blackbirds from hidden Milanese courtyards. He considered telephoning Fulvia, but that held large implications - she insisted on clarity, and he liked to think of himself as "the unhappy incarnation of all the historic defeats of the 2Oth century". |
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Montaigne says that there are more books about books than about any other subject, and in recent years it has sometimes seemed that there are more novels about novels. Anyone who casts an eye over the reigning fashions in fiction - fiction with serious literary pretensions, that is - can hardly help being struck by the proliferation of fables that fold in on themselves, stories that escape from their fictional frame, novels designed to remind us (as though we were in danger of supposing anything else) that a novel is only a novel, and not a slice of reality. As someone who usually prefers to take his fiction straight, I find the vogue for experimental juggling - at anything less than the level of a Borges or a Calvino - fairly easy to resist, and I must admit that my heart sank a little when I first picked up "The House on Moon Lake" and saw it described on the jacket as "the story of a story". But as soon I started reading, my reservations melted away. From the outset it is a book that proceeds with confidence and clarity, and skillfully baits the narrative hook. |
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First, the good news. "The House on Moon Lake" is wise, funny, bewitching and short. There is no bad news. In principle, I think it is a mistake to begin a review this way. The adjectives are so general that they snub the book's particular virtues. It is like saying "Oh, wow!" to an especially successful sunset. On the other hand, what do you say to a sunset? As long as I am to hang for an exclamatory sheep, let me throw in a cow. The word short. The 187 pages of Francesca Duranti's novel are like one of those dreams that seem to contain an epic amount of color and emotion when it has only occupied about three minutes of sleep. |
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