Still Life

 

Still Life by Sarah Winman

Fiction - Historical

2021

Finished on April 29, 2024

Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

A captivating, bighearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood, and the ghost of E. M. Forster, by the celebrated author of Tin Man.

Tuscany, 1944: As Allied troops advance and bombs sink villages, a young English soldier, Ulysses Temper, finds himself in the wine cellar of a deserted villa. There, he has a chance encounter with Evelyn Skinner, a middle-aged art historian intent on salvaging paintings from the ruins. In each other, Ulysses and Evelyn find a kindred spirit amidst the rubble of war-torn Italy, and paint a course of events that will shape Ulysses’s life for the next four decades.

Returning home to London, Ulysses reimmerses himself in his crew at The Stoat and Parot—a motley mix of pub crawlers and eccentrics—all the while carrying with him his Italian evocations. So, when an unexpected inheritance brings him back to where it all began, Ulysses knows better than to tempt he must return to the Tuscan hills.

With beautiful prose, extraordinary tenderness, and bursts of humor and light, Still Life is a sweeping portrait of unforgettable individuals who come together to make a family, and a deeply drawn celebration of beauty and love in all its forms.

Marvelous! I'm so glad I didn't give up on this outstanding novel. The first fifty pages didn't grab me, but after that, I was hooked. The touching relationships between a small group of friends prove that family is more than that in which we are born. I loved each and every one, including Claude, the parrot!

It took me a little over two weeks to read, but if we weren't traveling, I could have read it in a few short days, it was that engrossing. And yet, I found myself putting it down every dozen or so pages, willing myself to make it last. 456 pages and I wanted more!

On Art:

We like beauty, don't we? Something good on the eye cheers us. Does something to us on a cellular level, makes us feel alive and enriched. Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world, Ulysses. It repositions our sight and judgment. Captures forever that which is fleeting. A meager stain in the corridors of history, that’s all we are. A little mark of scuff. One hundred and fifty years ago Napoleon breathed the same air as we do now. The battalion of time marches on. Art versus humanity is not the question, Ulysses. One doesn’t exist without the other. Art is the antidote. Is that enough to make it important? Well, yes, I think it is.

On Love:

What are we without love? 

Waiting, said Evelyn.

Humor:

Do I look as tipsy as I feel?

No point asking me, dear, said Dotty, I’ve been talking to two of you for the last hour.

I was captivated by Sarah Winman's beautiful prose, details of Italy (specifically Florence), and snappy dialogue, greedily adding her earlier works to my list of future purchases. I remember hearing good things about Tin Man, but never got around to buying it. If it's half as good as Still Life, I know I'll love it! This is one I hugged to my chest as I finished the final page, and I'll happily read a second time. Sure to appeal to readers who enjoy historical fiction, Renaissance art, Italy, and love...

Highly recommend!

Note: I rarely write my own synopsis of the books I review, instead relying on the publisher's blurb for those who wish to learn more about the plot and characters. The one above is spoiler-free, so I encourage you to give it a read. 

A parade of small stories, intimate connections and complex characters... Sentence after sentence, character by character, Still Life becomes poetry. ~ The New York Times Book Review

Under the Tuscan Sun

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

Nonfiction - Memoir

1996

Finished on March 28, 2024

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

Frances Mayes—widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer—opens the door to a wondrous new world when she buys and restores an abandoned villa in the spectacular Tuscan countryside. In sensuous and evocative language, she brings the reader along as she discovers the beauty and simplicity of life in Italy. An accomplished cook and food writer, Mayes also creates dozens of delicious seasonal recipes from her traditional kitchen and simple garden, all of which she includes in the book. Doing for Tuscany what M.F.K. Fisher and Peter Mayle did for Provence, Mayes writes about the tastes and pleasures of a foreign country with gusto and passion. A celebration of the extraordinary quality of life in Tuscany, Under the Tuscan Sun is a feast for all the senses. 

I've owned a copy of Under the Tuscan Sun for so long, the pages have turned yellow! I finally decided to give it a read and enjoyed it immensely. It's the perfect sort of memoir to pick up and read a few pages (or chapters) here and there. Mayes does a marvelous job depicting her new home and surroundings in Tuscany. While not as humorous as Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence, I savored the prose and descriptions of meals much more so with this book. I saw the film (starring Diane Lane) twenty years or so ago, and as I remember, I enjoyed it, but it's very loosely based on Mayes' memoir. I'm glad I read the book many years later, so as not to compare the two since they're completely different stories.

Some of my favorite passages...

The forno in Cortona bakes a crusty bread in their wood oven, a perfect toast. Breakfast is one of my favorite times because the mornings are so fresh, with no hint of the heat to come. I get up early and take my toast and coffee out on the terrace for an hour with a book and the green-black rows of cypresses against the soft sky, the hills pleated with olive terraces that haven't changed since the seasons were depicted in medieval psalters. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. I forget my book. Pear cobbler, pear chutney, pear ice, green figs (would the wasps already be in green figs?) with pork, fig fritters, fig and nocciolo tart. May summer last a hundred years.

and

As I unload my cloth sacks, the kitchen fills with the scents of sunny fruits and vegetables warmed in the car. Everyone coming home from market must feel compelled to arrange the tomatoes, eggplants, (melanzane sounds like the real name and even aubergine is better than dreary-sounding eggplant), zucchini, and enormous peppers into a still life in the nearest basket. I resist arranging the fruit in a bowl, except for what we'll eat today, because it's ripe this minute and all we're not about to eat now must go in the fridge.

and

I have considered my table, its ideals as well as its dimensions. If I were a child, I would want to lift up the tablecloth and crawl under the unending table, into the flaxen light where I could crouch and listen to the loud laughs, clinks, and grown-up talk, hear over and over "Salute" and "Cin-cin" travelling around the chairs, stare at kneecaps and walking shoes and flowered skirts hiked up to catch a breeze, the table steady under its weight of food. Such a table should accommodate the wanderings of a large dog. At the end, you need room for an enormous vase of all the flowers in bloom at the moment. The width should allow platters to meander from hand to hand down the center, stopping where they will, and numerous water and wine bottles to accumulate over the hours. You need room for a bowl of cool water to dip the grapes and pears into, a little covered dish to keep the bugs off the Gorgonzola (dolce as opposed to the piccante type, which is for cooking) and caciotta, a local soft cheese. No one cares if olive pits are flung into the distance. The best wardrobe for such a table runs to pale linens, blue checks, pink and green plaid, not dead white, which takes in too much glare. If the table is long enough, everything can be brought out at once, and no one has to run back and forth to the kitchen. Then the table is set for primary pleasure: lingering meals, under the trees at noon. The open air confers an ease, a relaxation and freedom. You're your own guest, which is the way summer ought to be. 

and

I was drawn to the surface of Italy for its perched towns, the food, language, and art. I was pulled also to its sense of lived life, the coexistence of times that somehow gives an aura of timelessness--I toast the Etruscan wall above us with my coffee every morning--all the big abstracts that act out in everything from the aggression on the autostrada to the afternoon stroll through the piazza. I cast my lot here for a few short months a year because my curiosity for the layered culture of the country is enexhaustible. But the umbilical that is totally unexpected and elides logic reaches to me through the church. 

 Marvelous armchair travel. Highly recommend!

Keeping the Feast

Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy by Paula Butturini
Nonfiction - Memoir
2010 Riverhead Books
Finished on July 28, 2016
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

Paula Butturini and John Tagliabue met as foreign correspondents in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But not even a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred away from their Italian paradise when John was shot and nearly killed on the job. The period of physical and mental suffering that followed marked the abrupt end of what they'd known together and the beginning of a phase of life neither had planned for.

They followed their instincts and returned to the place they loved, Italy, and there they found a lifeline of sorts. As John struggled to regain his health and Paula reexamined her assumptions about illness and recovery, it was food and its rituals--the daily shopping, preparing, sharing, and memory of food--that kept them moving forward. Food became a symbol of the family's innate desire to survive, to accept, and to celebrate what fell its way.

Keeping the Feast is an inspiring story of what happens when tragedy strikes a previously happy marriage and a couple must fight to find its bearings. It is a testament to the extraordinary sustaining powers of food and love, to the healing that can come from the simple rituals of life, even during life's biggest challenges, and to the stubborn belief that there is always an afterward, always hope.

My dear friend Meredith sent me this book waaaay back in 2010. I was so excited to read it, but as we all know, reading is driven by moods and for whatever reason, this book didn't call out to me as quickly as I thought it would. It languished in the bookcase until I finally decided the time was right. It was summertime and I was eager for some armchair travel, so I dove in and was quickly transported to Italy.

We moved into a small apartment near the Tiber on one of those golden October days so perfect that you could never imagine willingly leaving the city again. Every morning I would walk down our narrow street toward the hubbub of Campo dei Fiori, where the flower sellers, the fruit vendors, the vegetable sellers, the fishmongers, the mushroom lady, the bread shop, the lamb and chicken lady, the pork butcher, the notions man, the meat vans, the olive and herbs vendors, the newspaper kiosk, the housewares stand, and the roving garlic salesmen from Bangladesh were always open for business no matter how early I awakened.

Morning after morning for an entire year, I walked to the Campo before most people were up. Noisy, honking, shouting Rome is almost quiet at that hour, and what began as a simple routine soon took on the trappings of ritual. I woke up early, dressed, walked out the door and over to the Campo. I would buy a shiny, plump purple-black eggplant. Or a handful of slender green beans, or fresh and young you could eat them raw. I brought three golden pear, or a heavy bunch of fat, green grapes. I bought a few slices of Milanese salami, a bit of veal. I bought a thin slab of creamy gorgonzola, to spread on crusty, still-warm bread. I bought milk, yogurt, butter, and eggs, and finally the newspapers. Then I would head home, stopping in the tiny church of Santa Brigida, which lay halfway between the Campo and our apartment. The first few months, I would rest my bundles on the cold marble floor, kneel for a moment at the back of the church under the gaze of a painted Madonna, and try not to cry. Months later, I would still kneel for a moment in the same spot, but when I felt the tears coming, I'd make a fist and pound once or twice on the pew in front of me. It made a fitting, hollow sound in the almost empty church. Then I would collect my bundles and continue my short walk home.

I needed both parts of the ritual, the buying of the food and the stopping in the church. We all must eat, and there is nothing more normal than buying the food that keeps us alive. When I performed the ritual of buying our daily bread, the world seemed more normal. Pounding a pew a few minutes later brought home how far from normal I still felt.

Buttarini's memoir isn't just about food and living in Italy. It's about a terrible act of violence. I found myself nodding in agreement.

Years later, I still have difficulty even connecting them to a shooting. Shootings, I still like to think, happen to drug dealers or innocent passerby in New York, to foreign tourists visiting Miami. They happen to people who clean guns or keep them under their beds. They happen to soldiers, to policemen, to mafiosi, to people who have enemies. They don't happen to my husband, my family, to me. I suspect my response of utter disbelief is standard for anyone who hasn't been blindsided by some sort of shock: the sudden diagnosis of a rampaging cancer, the overnight loss of a family's life savings. Shocks like these hammer the notion that a history of good luck is no amulet for the future.

But she does write some mouth-watering passages about food that had me reaching for my Post-It notes and longing to move to Italy!

John and I quickly fell into a routine of meeting Joseph on the terrace that overlooked the lake to eat our meals together. We started around eight, with thick slices of crusty country bread, with butter and jams from the garden's fruit trees, perhaps a bit of cheese or yogurt with honey from the hives that stood below the house, and mugs of strong, milky tea. After working in the garden or doing other small chores, we met again for "elevenses," milky coffee and a couple of simple, store-bought cookies, so we could keep our hunger at bay till the main midday meal about one p.m. I happily took on the cooking: a simple pasta or risotto to start; then a bit of sauteed veal or chicken and a vegetable from the garden; a green salad tossed with olive oil, lemon, and sugar--as Joseph liked it--then fruit, followed by the inevitable siesta.

Final Thoughts:

I love a good foodie memoir, but about halfway into this book, I began to lose interest. Hating to give up on a book that so many of my friends raved about, I pushed on, hoping to finish with at least a 3-star rating. I enjoyed the descriptions of the food and meals shared with family and friends, but Keeping the Feast is such a bleak story. The author was beaten, her husband shot, her mother suffered from depression and then her husband dealt with the same, and on and on it goes. I decided to take a break for about a month, but after that I didn't have any desire to finish the book. So much for a 3-star rating.

Death at La Fenice

Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon
Mystery
Guido Brunetti Series #1
1992 HarperCollins
Finished 2/5/12
Rating: 4.5/5 (Terrific!)

Venice Challenge #1

Publisher’s Blurb:

There is little violent crime in Venice, a serenely beautiful floating city of mystery and magic, history and decay. But the evil that does rear its head on occasion is the jurisdiction of Guido Brunetti, the suave, urbane vice-commissario of police and a genius at detection. Now all of his admirable abilities must come into play in the deadly affair of Maestro Helmut Wellauer, a world-renowned conductor who died painfully from cyanide poisoning during intermission at La Fenice. But as the investigation unfolds, a chilling picture slowly begins to take shape—a detailed portrait of revenge painted with vivid strokes of hatred and shocking depravity. And the dilemma for Guido Brunetti will not be finding a murder suspect…but, rather, narrowing the choice down to one.

“A splendid series…With a backdrop of the city so vivid you can almost smell it.” Sunday Telegraph (London)


It’s been almost five years since I first heard about Donna Leon’s “Venice” series. I was chatting with a customer about some of my favorite mysteries writers and he asked if I had ever read any of Leon’s mysteries. When I told him I hadn’t, he practically insisted I stop reading my current book and immediately start in on the Guido Brunetti series. I’m sorry to say I only made a mental note to give the book a try, but I have Bellezza to thank for giving me the incentive to finally pick up this literary mystery.

Guido. What a great name. Move over, Lucas Davenport. I’ve found a new love. ;)

Guido Brunetti, a commissario of the police for the city, was first through the door…He was a surprisingly neat man: tie carefully knotted, hair shorter than was the fashion; even his ears lay close to his head, as if reluctant to call attention to themselves. His clothing marked him as Italian. The cadence of his speech announced that he was Venetian. His eyes were all policeman.

Brunetti has a wry sense of humor and I enjoyed the conversations (as well as his internal monologue) between him and his supervisor, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta.

“It sounds like you’re making excuses for her,” said Patta, then added, “Is she pretty?” Brunetti realized Patta must have found about the difference in age between the dead man and his widow.

“If you like tall blonds,” Brunetti said.

“Don’t you?”

“My wife doesn’t permit me to, sir.”

and

“Now pay attention, Brunetti.” Brunetti nodded. “I want the name of anyone who was in the dressing room, or near it, last night. And I want to find out more about the wife. How long they’ve been married, where she comes from, that sort of thing.” Brunetti nodded.

“Brunetti?” Patta suddenly asked.

“Yes, sir?”

“Why aren’t you taking notes?”

Brunetti permitted himself the smallest of smiles. “Oh, I never forget anything you say, sir.”

I also enjoyed peeking into Brunetti’s personal life:

He opened the door, glad of the warmth and smell he associated with the apartment: lavender, wax, the scent of something cooking in the kitchen at the back; it was a mixture that represented to him, in a way he couldn’t explain, the existence of sanity in the daily madness that was his work.

“Is that you, Guido?” Paola called from the living room. He wondered who else she might be expecting at two in the morning, but he didn’t ask.

On Venetian commerce:

A half hour before his appointment with Signora Wellauer, he left his office and walked slowly up toward Piazza San Marco. Along the way, he paused to look into shop windows, shocked, as he always was when in the center of the city, by how quickly their composition was changing. It seemed to him that all the shops that served the native population—pharmacies, shoemakers, groceries—were slowly and inexorably disappearing, replaced by slick boutiques and souvenir shops that catered to the tourists, filled with luminescent plastic gondolas from Taiwan and papier-mache masks from Hong Kong. It was the desires of the transients, not the needs of the residents, that the city’s merchants answered. He wondered how long it would take before the entire city became a sort of living museum, a place fit only for visiting and not for inhabiting.

On Venetian crime:

Brunetti often mused that the crime rate in Venice was low—one of the lowest in Europe and certainly the lowest in Italy—because the criminals, and they were almost always thieves, simply didn’t know how to get away. Only a resident could navigate the spiderweb of narrow calles, could know in advance that this one was a dead end or that one ended in a canal. And the Venetians, the native population, tended to be law-abiding, if only because their tradition and history had given them an excessive respect for the rights of private property and the imperative need to see to its safekeeping. So there was very little crime, and when there was an act of violence or, much more rarely, a murder, the criminal was quickly and easily found: the husband, the neighbor, the business partner. Usually all they had to do was round up the usual suspects.

On Venice, the city:

Brunetti walked up toward the hotel, still lighted, even at this hour when the rest of the city was darkened and sleeping. Once the capital of the dissipations of a continent, Venice had become a sleepy provincial town that virtually ceased to exist after nine or ten at night. During the summer months, she could remember her courtesan past and sparkle, as long as the tourists paid and the good weather held, but in the winter, she became a tired old crone, eager to crawl early to bed, leaving her deserted streets to cats and memories of the past.

But these were the hours when, for Brunetti, the city became most beautiful, just as they were the same hours when he, Venetian to the bone, could sense some of her past glory. The darkness of the night hid the moss that crept up the steps of the palazzi lining the Grand Canal, obscured the cracks in the walls of churches, and covered the patches of plaster missing from the facades of public buildings. Like many women of a certain age, the city needed the help of deceptive light to recapture her vanished beauty. A boat that, during the day, was making a delivery of soap powder or cabbages, at night became a numinous form, floating toward some mysterious destination. The fogs that were common in these winter days could transform people and objects, even turn long-haired teenagers, hanging around a street corner and sharing a cigarette, into mysterious phantoms from the past.

Gritti Terrazza

I thought it was terrific read and can’t wait to return to Venice and see what’s in store for Guido. (Did I already mention that I love that name? And what a likeable character!)

Final thoughts: Quite the page-turner, Donna Leon’s debut mystery is satisfying and a series that I’m anxious to continue reading.

Books added to my TBR list:

Teatro La Fenice

The Teatro Fenice has a remarkable history. It was first constructed after a fire destroyed Venice's leading opera house, the San Benedetto Theatre, in 1774. Bearing an appropriate name, La Fenice (The Phoenix) was inaugurated on May 16, 1792. During the 19th century, La Fenice housed the three great Italian composers of the period: Bellini, Rossini and Donizetti's work all premiered there. Tragically, a fire in December 1836 razed the building to the ground, but it was rebuilt and opened again in December 1837. La Fenice's international renown was firmly established when it initiated the First International Festival of Contemporary Music in 1930. Fate struck again in 1996 when another fire claimed the building. At last the restoration work is complete and La Fenice has once again been raised from its ashes and restored to its former glory! (Information from Divento)




More cover art for Death at La Fenice:

The Enchanted April

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
Fiction
1922 Washington Square Press
Quit on 1/14/11
Rating: DNF




Product Description:

High above a bay on the Italian Riviera, the small medieval castle of San Salvatore was awash with the scent of flowers, its olive groves sweeping in terraced descent down to the sun-warmed sea. San Salvatore invited the heart to burst into bloom...

Mrs. Wilkins and Mrs. Arbuthnot are glad to leave their stifling duties and distant husbands behind; Mrs. Fisher wants only to sit in the sun and savor her youthful memories, while Lady Caroline Dester longs for the sweet oblivion of no adoring suitors. They agree to rent the castle for a month of blissful privacy. Yet, amid the showers of fragrant wisteria, in the hazy heat and sensuous silence, each one will be seduced and changed by the magic of San Salvatore...

I’m planning to travel to Italy (!!) next year to celebrate my 50th birthday. My hope is to read all of the books I’ve collected over the years that are set in that enchanting country. I’ve owned this particular book for more than a decade and I’ve tried to read it a couple of times, but have never gotten very far. After reading Bellezza’s review, I decided to give it another go. Well, I tried. But once again I failed to finish and quit after more than 100 pages. Maybe I’ll just have to settle for a viewing of the film.

That said, I did mark the following and after re-reading these little gems, I am actually re-considering the book.



The bedrooms and two of the sitting-rooms at San Salvatore were on the top floor, and opened into a roomy hall with a wide glass window at the north end. San Salvatore was rich in small gardens in different parts and on different levels. The garden this window looked down on was made on the highest part of the walls, and could only be reached through the corresponding spacious hall on the floor below. When Mrs. Wilkins came out of her room this window stood wide open, and beyond it in the sun was a Judas tree in full flower. There was no sign of anybody, no sound of voices or feet. Tubs of arum lilies stood about on the stone floor, and on a table flamed a huge bunch of fierce nasturtiums. Spacious, flowery, silent, with the wide window at the end opening into the garden, and the Judas tree absurdly beautiful in the sunshine, it seemed to Mrs. Wilkins, arrested on her way across to Mrs. Arbuthnot, too good to be true. Was she really going to live in this for a whole month? Up to now she had had to take what beauty she could as she went along, snatching at little bits of it when she came across it—a patch of daisies on a fine day in a Hampstead field, a flash of sunset between two chimney pots. She had never been in definitely, completely beautiful places. She had never been even in a venerable house; and such a thing as a profusion of flowers in her rooms was unattainable to her. Sometimes in the spring she had bought six tulips at Shoolbred's, unable to resist them, conscious that Mellersh if he knew what that had cost would think it inexcusable; but they had soon died, and then there were no more. As for the Judas tree, she hadn't an idea what it was, and gazed at it out there against the sky with the rapt expression of one who sees a heavenly vision.

and

They left the path, and clambered down the olive terraces, down and down, to where at the bottom the warm, sleepy sea heaved gently among the rocks. There a pine-tree grew close to the water, and they sat under it, and a few yards away was a fishing-boat lying motionless and green-bellied on the water. The ripples of the sea made little gurgling noises at their feet. They screwed up their eyes to be able to look into the blaze of light beyond the shade of their tree. The hot smell from the pine-needles and from the cushions of wild thyme that padded the spaces between the rocks, and sometimes a smell of pure honey from a clump of warm irises up behind them in the sun, puffed across their faces. Very soon Mrs. Wilkins took her shoes and stockings off, and let her feet hang in the water. After watching her a minute Mrs. Arbuthnot did the same. Their happiness was then complete. Their husbands would not have known them. They left off talking. They ceased to mention heaven. They were just cups of acceptance.

Maybe I’ll just read it in bits & pieces and see if I wind up enjoying it as much as Bellezza. I'm having a difficult time saying I'm finished with this book...