- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Knopf Canada; First Edition edition (Feb 14 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0676977278
- ISBN-13: 978-0676977271
- Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 15.2 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 499 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,215,848 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“With enough colour and outrage in the characters to please Boccaccio, and enough love, venom and splendour in the proceedings to please Dante, Frutkin’s Fabrizio’s Return is a grand entertainment that will streak across the reader’s imagination, well, like a comet.”
—Yann Martel
“Woven into the threads of Fabrizio’s universe, where time and space fold with the ease and beauty of a passing storm, is the quest to find one’s true self, and to glimpse the life eternal. Mark Frutkin is a wonderful and generous writer.”
—Madeleine Thien
“Fabrizio’s Return is a virtuoso performance of music, drama, faith, temptation and love that dazzlingly subverts the boundaries of time, while binding itself to humanity through the streak of a recurring comet.”
—Joan Barfoot
“Mark Frutkin still hasn’t heard that novels rarely enchant any longer, or that the form can’t match the seductions of the screen. Fabrizio’s Return compliments all the usual Frutkin dares – the stylistic bravura and erudition, the imaginative occupation of distant times and places – with a wit and charm that makes this story his most delightful, and slyly serious, to date.”
—Charles Foran
“Fabrizio’s Return is a grand novel full of ossuaries and telescopes, gargoyles and magic potions, apocalyptic paintings, angels, comets, violins, of murmurations of starlings, and characters – such characters! – to make you fall in love.”
–Alan Cumyn
Praise for Mark Frutkin:
“Frutkin is a master of visual imagery.”
–The Globe and Mail
“Alchemy exists in his ability to open our eyes to the commonplace.”
–Toronto Star
“Frutkin is one of the most amusing authors writing in English in the world today.”
–Ottawa Citizen
—Yann Martel
“Woven into the threads of Fabrizio’s universe, where time and space fold with the ease and beauty of a passing storm, is the quest to find one’s true self, and to glimpse the life eternal. Mark Frutkin is a wonderful and generous writer.”
—Madeleine Thien
“Fabrizio’s Return is a virtuoso performance of music, drama, faith, temptation and love that dazzlingly subverts the boundaries of time, while binding itself to humanity through the streak of a recurring comet.”
—Joan Barfoot
“Mark Frutkin still hasn’t heard that novels rarely enchant any longer, or that the form can’t match the seductions of the screen. Fabrizio’s Return compliments all the usual Frutkin dares – the stylistic bravura and erudition, the imaginative occupation of distant times and places – with a wit and charm that makes this story his most delightful, and slyly serious, to date.”
—Charles Foran
“Fabrizio’s Return is a grand novel full of ossuaries and telescopes, gargoyles and magic potions, apocalyptic paintings, angels, comets, violins, of murmurations of starlings, and characters – such characters! – to make you fall in love.”
–Alan Cumyn
Praise for Mark Frutkin:
“Frutkin is a master of visual imagery.”
–The Globe and Mail
“Alchemy exists in his ability to open our eyes to the commonplace.”
–Toronto Star
“Frutkin is one of the most amusing authors writing in English in the world today.”
–Ottawa Citizen
Book Description
A brilliant novel packed with delights: grand romance, alchemical potions, violins to make you weep, commedia dell’arte theatre, reappearing comets, rambling skeletons and cracks in time.
It is 1682 in Cremona, Italy. With his manservant, an insolent dwarf named Omero, Fabrizio Cambiati, a priest, climbs the town clocktower to await the return of a comet that is said to reappear in the skies every 76 years. He has a new invention called a telescope with which to scour the night. As they await the comet, he scopes the town below and sees the commedia dell’arte players setting up in the town square and a Jesuit arriving in a carriage. We later learn that the Jesuit is Michele Archenti, a Devil’s Advocate sent from Rome to investigate the candidacy for sainthood of this same Fabrizio Cambiati – 76 years later!
The novel then begins again, this time in 1758 when Archenti settles himself in the town to assume his investigations. It is his job to find the flaws in Fabrizio’s character. In this attempt, he interviews a number of citizens, including an old duchess who holds a secret about Fabrizio’s life that would ruin the reputation of this priest, who was both a hidden alchemist and healer. The play held in the town square connects the two time periods by reflecting the goings-on in the wider world. We meet the players, as well as the duke, his beautiful daughter, a happy madman roaming the countryside with a skeleton on his back, and a hunchback who lives with his mastiff in a labyrinthine palace that is, like imagination itself, continually mutating.
With enormous assurance and a wonderful affection for his characters, Mark Frutkin has woven a miraculous tale that explores the ambiguous nature of reality and on every page packs joy into the reading.
It is 1682 in Cremona, Italy. With his manservant, an insolent dwarf named Omero, Fabrizio Cambiati, a priest, climbs the town clocktower to await the return of a comet that is said to reappear in the skies every 76 years. He has a new invention called a telescope with which to scour the night. As they await the comet, he scopes the town below and sees the commedia dell’arte players setting up in the town square and a Jesuit arriving in a carriage. We later learn that the Jesuit is Michele Archenti, a Devil’s Advocate sent from Rome to investigate the candidacy for sainthood of this same Fabrizio Cambiati – 76 years later!
The novel then begins again, this time in 1758 when Archenti settles himself in the town to assume his investigations. It is his job to find the flaws in Fabrizio’s character. In this attempt, he interviews a number of citizens, including an old duchess who holds a secret about Fabrizio’s life that would ruin the reputation of this priest, who was both a hidden alchemist and healer. The play held in the town square connects the two time periods by reflecting the goings-on in the wider world. We meet the players, as well as the duke, his beautiful daughter, a happy madman roaming the countryside with a skeleton on his back, and a hunchback who lives with his mastiff in a labyrinthine palace that is, like imagination itself, continually mutating.
With enormous assurance and a wonderful affection for his characters, Mark Frutkin has woven a miraculous tale that explores the ambiguous nature of reality and on every page packs joy into the reading.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous,
By anonymous (Ottawa, Ontario) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Fabrizio's Return (Hardcover)
I love mystic tales, this one is intelligent and magical too. Having read Frutkin since his Atmospheres Appolinaire, each one of his six novels have been innovative in subject and treatment, this tops them all. The story has romance, reappearing comets, commedia dell'arte theatre, weeping violins, and magical potions for seduction of damsels of transcendental beauty. The author's sense of history and drama makes 17th Century Italy come alive. His characters whether Fabirizio, Michele Archenti or that wonderful skelton carrying Rudolfo are skillfully drawn. A deft light touch prevails the book making it accessible to old and young. Fantabulous.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
quite simply a great book,
By
This review is from: Fabrizio's Return (Paperback)
Yes, this book is confusing at times, but so is life. It's complex. It's smart. It kept on confounding me because I thought I knew wehre it was going and then the book started surprising me with it's new intentions. It is a story within a story within a story which plays out in a realistic way as well as in a fantastic way. The stories become real and dimensional and then slip back into simplicity again. There is a romance within it but, while the romance may be naiive, the book itself never is. Terrific. And though there are elements of magic realism, it reminded me much more of Italo Calvino than of Gabriel Garcia Marques.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fabrizio's Return (Hardcover)
A truly wonderful book - I recommend it to everyone.
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