- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: Knopf; 1st Edition edition (Jun 22 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0375405429
- ISBN-13: 978-0375405426
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 15.2 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 522 g
- Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Italian Fever is a strange soufflé--half mystery and half squib on American innocence and European experience. In Brooklyn, Lucy Stark, an author's assistant who has "come to prefer liberty to passion," despairs over her boss's latest manuscript. "DV's books were always awful, but what made this one worse than the others was the introduction of a new element, which was bound to boost sales: There was a ghost in the villa. DV had gone gothic." But then the phone rings, and she learns that DV will scribe no more, having died under strange circumstances in Ugolino. At least his demise will afford Lucy a vacation of sorts--a stay in Tuscany so that she can identify his body, sort through his effects, and perhaps divine the cause of his death.
Of course, from the moment her plane lands, she suffers from cultural disorientation, and worse. Why, exactly, is her handsome if humorless chauffeur, Massimo, so solicitous? Why is DV's villa in fact a farmhouse? And are its proprietors, the Cinis, conspiring to keep her from the truth? Then there are Lucy's Nancy Drew-like discoveries--a terrifying drawing of DV and a mysterious love letter. And is the scratching at the walls a sign from DV's ghost or something more quotidian? All in all, our heroine can't sort out hallucination from Italian provocation, which is all too much for someone who has long prided herself on her clear sight.
Though Valerie Martin's seventh novel has its share of stomach-clenching moments, it is most successful in its many comic scenes (not something this talented author has hitherto been known for). Whether Lucy is trying to break through Massimo's defenses or get to the bottom of the Cinis' behavior, she is usually miles from the truth. Meanwhile, Martin offers up a host of memorable minor figures, from DV's ultrasophisticated New York publisher to the quail-consuming, epigram-spouting Antonio Cini, who gets most of the good lines. When Lucy tells him that she's forever in Massimo's debt, he languidly responds: "Forever, that must be a tiresome sensation." Though Italian Fever is never in the least tiresome, its biggest mystery is how Martin--who has written so strikingly of possession in The Great Divorce--is here far stronger on satire than the supernatural. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
The reality-distorting fever that afflicts the i-dotting, t-crossing Lucy StarkAa plainish Brooklyn woman who finds herself embroiled in the creepy intrigues of the aristocratic Cini familyAenvelops her mere days after she arrives in northern Italy, and barely breaks before this upmarket gothic novel comes to closure. Lucy's delirium makes her likely to misinterpret all the things that go bump in the night, and yet when the lights come on at the novel's end, nearly all the ghouls shrink into shadows. In Tuscany on rather strange businessAher employer, a popular and formulaic fiction writer named DV, has drunkenly met his death by falling down a well on the Cini propertyALucy becomes suspicious of the Cinis' byzantine ways and their dodginess on the subject of the American painter Catherine Bultman, whom Lucy assumed had been living as DV's lover in the house he rented on the Cini grounds. With her temperature steadily rising, Lucy rifles through DV's belongings and finds an amorous letter to Catherine, written in Italian and signed Antonio. Thinking she has uncovered a valuable clueAAntonio is the name of the seedy scion of the Cini lineALucy begins to make more pointed inquiries about Catherine's whereabouts and the circumstances of her departure. She is waylaid in her investigation by her illness, however, and by the equally damaging and consuming affair she begins with the married Roman hunk named Massimo who nurses her back to health. Besides being a born-again passionate, Lucy is an art enthusiast; Martin's knowledge of iconography and hagiography adds an intellectual dimension to the romantic plot. Martin also describes the food in Tuscany and Rome luxuriouslyAif sometimes with a hungry street urchin's obsessive care. With a few ghosts, several acts of love and numerous jibes at self-indulgent writers of the DV school, the sophisticated romantic adventure is rendered with stylish flair. Martin controls the narrative momentum smoothly and recounts her tale with occasional wryness and engaging enthusiasm. 50,000 first printing.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
What was this book really about?,
By
This review is from: Italian Fever: A Novel (Paperback)
Well...reviewers for Amazon seemed to love or hate this novel, for the most part. I feel rather indifferent about it. Truthfully, I would probably never have finished it if I had actual work to do at my job!Lucy Stark is a writer's assistant whose employer, writing abroad, suddenly turns up dead. She is left the task of putting his affairs in order and looking for the rest of a manuscript he has been working on. What starts out as a possible murder mystery quickly devolves into simply a diary of an American's time spent in Italy, replete with art appreciation, affairs and lots of cappucino consumption. This novel didn't seem to follow its initial intentions or promises, although when the end finally comes, everything is wrapped up to some satisfaction. Had the book simply been to detail an American's experience abroad and what she learned about herself along the way, I would have understood how to read it. As it is, it seems the author did a little of this, a little of that, but I cannot complain about the quality of the language and the flow of the writing. My main feeling is that this book did not AFFECT me, the way I feel a good novel should. I probably won't think about it again.
2.0 out of 5 stars
What book's flap copy didn't say,
By "lsewall" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Italian Fever (Hardcover)
Why oh why can't I remember to ignore bookjacket flap copy? I might have appreciated "Italian Fever" more if it hadn't been touted as a murder mystery. I might have savored the love story for what it was, instead of wondering why it took up such a large portion of the book, and why the murder was left to the end to be explained away in an undramatic and therefore unsatisfying twist of perception. I might not have minded the ease with which Lucy abandons her "sleuthing" to follow her married lover to Roma, even though she hadn't found much out. I might not have been so surprised by her unexplained expertise and awe of Italian art, with which she impresses Italians, and tries to prove that despite her cowardly cynicism about D.V.'s commerical art, she is moved only by real beauty. Is this what the jacket flap copy should have explained, that the story is about a suspicious American who comes to Italy, the land of love, and learns that if she wasn't so suspicious she would be able to understand the truth--that things can be sadder or more pathetic than she ever imagined? The reason the flap copy was confusing might have been that copywriters only read first chapters. Or it could be that they are really good at glossing over a story's problems.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Italian Fever,
By
This review is from: Italian Fever: A Novel (Paperback)
This book could as well have been called "Pittsburg Fever" or "Tucson Fever" for all the relation it had to Italy. Surely there are ghosts there, and eccentric families, which were the only 2 things about this book that gave it any need to be placed in Italy. I believe the author gave it that name in order to seduce people into buying it, thinking they would be reading a story that related to that fascinating country or that had some unusual plot or theme that would not be believable in another locale. This book was basically a story about a woman with no sense at all who spent her whole time in Italy, expenses paid, holed up in an uninteresting villa with a married man who virtually ignored her when they were not in the villa. Not much suspense, not much imagination, not much to recommend it. One star is one too many. Don't waste your time or believe any of the good press about this one. Valerie Martin should be ashamed.
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