Book Review—A Very Normal Man by Vincenzo Cerami

Giovanni Vivaldi is a very normal man. After leaving his parent's destitute farm and doing his military service he started working at The Ministry in Rome, where he has worked for thirty years and has become a mid-level bureaucrat. His plan is to soon retire and fix up a dilapidated shack in the countryside with his snarky wife, Amalia. But before that can be done he must complete his life’s achievement: helping his son Mario, a newly qualified accountant, to get a job at The Ministry, so that he along with his generation can lead to better things. But this is no simple matter. With 12,000 candidates applying for 2,000 positions and an oral and written exam to face, Giovanni must perform strange rites to secure his son’s future. But all his efforts prove pointless due to one man, and Giovanni dedicates his efforts to revenge.

Giovanni is an odd character. He is the victim of circumstance but is more than willing to exploit this same master for his own ends when it suits him. This is aided by a society that mixes the detachment of bureaucracy with the ritual of faith and superstition: the files Giovanni must formulate day in and day out, to the church around the corner where Amalia replenishes her supply of holy water, to the extravagantly calculated yet mundanely received Freemasonry ceremony are all par for the course. The normality lies not with the man, but with his responses. Nothing is too bizarre, no act too incomprehensible, no loss too irreconcilable. All are simply the acts one must perform in life, and this is simply normal for a man.

As darkly hilarious as its conclusion is troubling, A Very Normal Man shows the peculiarities that disrupt the notion of a normal life.
Andreas

Book Review - A Darkness Descending by Christobal Kent

Sandro Cellini and his wife Luisa are wise and kind people. Sandro is a private investigator and is caught up in the mysterious collapse of a left wing politician and the disappearance of the politician's defacto wife. At the same time, Chiara, the daughter of their friends, moves out with a mystery boyfriend. Sandro and Luisa each try to help their friends and clients but in the end, people will do what they do for both simple and complex reasons. Death comes. "Some people were able to sidestep a death as if with a practiced movement – nothing to do with them, they were alive. But for most it stood in their path a long time, like a beggar with his hand out. And when they managed to edge past death, even if they never turned around, they knew it would still be there, watching." Christobal Kent in fine from with this latest outing for Sandro et al. Wendy

Review - The Venetian Contract by Marina Fiorato

Feyra is a Turkish Muslim young woman from Constantinople, who has trained as a doctor but is on the run to Venice after the Sultan dies and his son inherits power. Their ship brings plague to Venice and Feyra takes refuge in the house of Palladio, the great architect, who has been contracted by the Doge to build a great church so that God will help Venice in her time of trouble. She is able to share the secrets of the great Islamic buildings in Constantinople with Palladio, which inform his designs. She then forms a professional working relationship with a Venetian doctor who has set up a hospital on an island where he can try new methods of combating the plague. This is an interesting time in medicine and the passages with Feyra and the doctor are the strongest. The author states that she wanted write a story about Palladio, but I think she has been taken over by her young heroine and the medical story. Although the different parts of the story do not really hang together well, you get an excellent feel for Venice in the late 1500s and a charming romance. Wendy

Book Review - Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth

This book intertwines the fairy story of Rapunzel with that of a witch in Renaissance Italy, and that of an actual historical figure, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force, a French writer who is said to have been a great influence on Sir Walter Scott, the father of modern fiction. Charlotte collected words:

"I liked to roll words over my tongue like a lump of molten honeycomb, savouring the sweetness, the crackle, the crunch. Cerulean, azure, blue. Shadowy, somber, secret. Voluptous, sensuous, amorous. Kiss, hiss, abyss.

Some words sounded dangerous. Pagan. Tiger.

Some words seemed to shine. Crystal. Glissade.

Some words changed their meaning as I grew older. Ravishing."

Charlotte's story covers her Huguenot family's fall in fortunes and her time at the sensual and extravagant French court of the Sun-King, Louis IV. Rapunzel's story is told by a nun in a strict convent and also in the first person by the witch's victim. And the witch's story becomes rather more complex than first thought. The author incorporates a great deal of historical detail seamlessly into the story, for example, you learn about Charlotte's clothing as she plays a game of strip poker with her lover; and about the food of the day as her childhood household prepares a great banquet for the visiting King. The chapters are headed by excerpts from different poets exploring the Rapunzel story, which adds to the deliciousness of the experience. This is a great read by an accomplished Australian wordsmith and highly recommended.

Wendy

Book Review - The Wife who Ran Away by Tess Stimson

Kate is nearly 40 and has taken on all the responsibility in her family, using her demanding but highly paid job to support her husband and children, her mother and help her sister's family. One day, following a series of disappointments and stresses, she leaves the family home in a bit of a fugue state and finds herself seeking refuge with an old friend in Rome, rediscovering her love of art history and trying to find out where she lost her own self along the way. Her husband and children deal with the shock of her absence, once they notice it, in their own ways. An entertaining story of how relationships get mired in roles that grow to overshadow the inner needs and desires of the people who start out whole but end up transformed into shadow people they don't want to be. How will Tess find out who and where she wants to be?

Wendy