Book notes No. 39 : In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant

Blue skies veiled in haze. The communal water-tap is frozen solid.

I must have read hundreds and hundreds of novels. Hundreds. I've leant my interior ear to narrators male and female. I've heard stories from school teachers, paedophiles, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, artists, murderers, criminals and innocents, from God, angels, Death and the Devil. I've been confused by rotating narrators and annoyed by first person narrators who die against the rules.

But I've never, never read a novel in which the narrator is a dwarf. And I have never, never learned so much about life as a dwarf in such a pleasurable way. 

Dunant's enthralling novel begins in 1527 with our heroine, a successful courtesan, fleeing the Sack of Rome with her friend and fixer Bucino, the dwarf in question. Together they start again from scratch with only the gems they have managed to swallow during their escape. In Venice.

Lisa Hilton of the Sunday Telegraph wrote that this is a "loving, intricate portrait of Venice - a city which [sic] magics light, glass and water into living entities - her story blends beauty and brutality into an intimate and thrilling portrait of an age". 

Yes, indeed. Yes, of course. But Bucino. Bucino's the thing. His viewpoint (at thigh height). His emotions, his pain, his vulnerabilities, his sensibilities, his strength and his tragedy. 

Come and visit La Serenissima at the height of her powers, meet Fiammetta the courtesan at the height of hers, and Bucino the dwarf testing his. You'll be glad you did.

December sunrise...

...Turner style.

That sunrise I mentioned yesterday.

And a good time...

...was had by all. 

The Christmas roll call was (left to right): Michel Lafarge 2007 Bourgogne Passetoutgrain; Louis Casters blanc de blanc champagne; Lafarge 2002 Bourgogne Pinot Noir; Burmester 1992 LBV Port; Lafarge 2007 Meursault; and Lafarge 1996 Vendanges Sélectionnées Volnay.  

PS After a glorious, nay, magnificent sunrise, the day is cloudy, still and frozen with the occasional sunny nanosecond.

Luce scribimus

A bright, sunshiney day. A bit parky, though.

Scribbling with light.

Porto Lido Cannobio.

One season ends, another begins

Mild, grey, still. 

As the hunting season comes into its penultimate day, the tree-cutting season begins, and already the battlements of Carmine Superiore are ringing with the roar of chainsaws. Strikes me the men need a reason to fly the too-warm, too-close Christmas nest.

A Christmas wish from Carmine Superiore

Warmer now. Mist and rain. A damp Christmas for Carmine Superiore.

The other day I wrote about the silence that follows the snow in Carmine. A friend stopped me in the street a day or two later and amid elaborate Italian Christmas greetings mentioned that my words had made her laugh, because in Carmine Superiore she imagined it was always silent. We talked a little about that special silence that comes after the snow, and about how Carmine isn't as silent as one might think, what with the wildlife crashing around the woods and all. 

Our conversation made me remember the silence that would come on Christmas morning (with or without snow) when I was a child. No cars. No rushing too and fro. No buses, no bells, no siren for the start of work at the nearby factory that gave our town life. Peace for a day. 

Today I'm wishing all readers a quiet and very happy Christmas, however you have chosen to celebrate it. And if I could give everyone a gift, I would give peace. The kind of peace that is not only silence without, but also silence within. The peace that brings the strength to face every passing day whatever it might bring. Real peace. The peace described so simply in the Gaelic blessing: 

Deep peace of the running wave to you,

Deep peace of the flowing air to you,

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,

Deep peace of the shining stars to you,

Deep peace of the gentle night to you,

Moon and stars pour their healing light on you.

Happy Christmas all!

Christmas eggs

Three degrees at 8am. Raining continuously.


But at least with the warmer weather, the hens have called off their strike and today produced their first eggs in what seems like months. Just in time to have decent eggs for Christmas!

Motherhood means ... No. 27

One degree at 8am. After snow overnight, rain all day, with slush ankle-deep going down the hill.

Motherhood means ...

...feeling free to try out some Christmas crafts, knowing that you can blame your disasters (about 99% in my case) on the children.

Our handsome Christmas visitor

"The redbreast sacred to the household gods,
Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky
In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves
His shivering mates, and pays to trusted man
His annual visit. Half afraid, he first
Against the window beats; then brisk alights
On the warm hearth; then, hopping o'er the floor,
Eyes all the smiling family askance,
And pecks, and starts, and wonders where he is-
Till, more familiar grown, the table crumbs
Attract his slender feet."

James Thomson (1726-44)

A pleasure to see this bringer of goodwill enjoying the food we leave for him on our windowsills, safely a full storey out of reach of Carmine's cut-throat cats.

An expat's Christmas lament

A fiery sunrise this morning to accompany me, my water-kettle steaming to the snow-bound chicks. Blue skies. Seems warmer.

Christmas is coming (as if you didn't know), and we're awash with candles, cards and Christmas trees. Every expat has to make a decision every year - to spend Christmas in their country of residence, or go 'home'. And having spent more than seven years now as an official, card-carrying resident here in Carmine Superiore, I generally choose to stay put where the chimneys are big enough for Santa, the woods are full of Christmas decorations and I'm among good friends.

At Christmas I, of course, miss my family. But I don't miss the mad cattle-truck crush of the trip home from London. I don't miss the last-minute shopping chaos. I don't miss Christmas tv. I don't miss turkey or Christmas pud or 'all the trimmings'. I don't miss the Queen's Speech and I don't miss the Big Film. 

In fact, apart from my family, there's only one thing I miss about Christmas in the UK. And it's something you really can't find anywhere else in the world. It's the ancient Christmas carols sung by a cathedral choir by candlelight. 

This I miss so badly I get a stone in my chest and tears in my eyes...



What do you miss about Christmas at home?

Quote of the week No. 43 : On pride

Overcast, almost preternaturally still. Warmer, though, thank God!

Satan fallen from Heaven in
 Gustave Doré's illustration for
Paradise Lost.

Pride is the seventh of the Seven Deadly Sins, and while it is closely associated with vanity - the all-consuming passion for one's own appearance - it's much more than this.  When pride is of the Seven Deadly Sins variety, it is so great, so all-encompassing, so mind-altering, that it squeezes out all but the self, even - and this is the Sin bit - God Himself, whatever you conceive Him to be. Satan's sin was the sin of pride, and we all know what that led to...the message of Milton's Paradise Lost is that pride is particularly deadly because it is the sin from which all others arise. And this isn't just a Christian preoccupation either. You just have to take a glance at Oedipus Rex or the Oresteia, to see that the Ancient Greeks, as an example among many, saw hubris - their version of pride - as sowing the seeds of tragedy.

This is not your normal pride. Not the understandable glow one feels at some particular success. Deadly pride is selfishness to the nth degree. My life. My body. My abilities. My status. My possessions. My achievements. My opinions. My experiences. My suffering. My pain. My way. 

Pride eclipses not only the spiritual in the minds of the prideful, but also leaves no space for other people. It finds its outlet in disrespect for others, in the fascistic determination to impose one's own view of the world on others, in an inability or unwillingness to feel empathy or compassion. 

Pride cannot accept fault. Pride twists the truth, always ready to lay the blame at someone else's door. 

Pride believes that it is either loved to distraction or hated to annihilation. There's only one step between pride and paranoia.

As Iris Murdoch wrote: "The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession".

It's up to you.

Motherhood means ... No. 26

Minus two at 9:30am. Brilliant, blinding sunshine sparkling across the snow.

Motherhood means ...

...being surprisingly, inordinately, almost-doing-the-macarena-in-public-ly elated to have succeeded in finding gelato for two spoiled brats in an out-of-season tourist town in mid-December in the snow. 

Now I'm off to buy the T-shirt! 

Malign imp

Minus two at 8am and snowing prettily but fairly solidly. Wondering whether, at going home time, Mama will be there to get them either going or home... 

 

The guardian of the door, Madonna del Ponte, Brissago.

This cherub is so remarkably hefty, so remarkably adult, I can't help feeling the mason had someone in mind.

Wildlife sighting

Cold this morning. Nature is making ice art in the streams and waterfalls. The chickens' water is frozen solid, and under foot the soil is bleached white and friable. Bright sunshine.

Birthday boy, Jakob! Lord of Misrule stops dead. His whole body is rigid. Only his enormous, black tartuffo nose moves. Slowly, his head swings round in an arc. Then back again. He surveys the treescape carefully.

Something there? 

Something there. 

Suddenly there is a crash. About 20m away, two large roe deer startle out of cover, they glance our way and then bound off uphill through the woods. 

A magnificent sight for a Happy Birthday morning.

Good luck!

Zero degrees at 8am. Blue skies. Foot-stamping cold.

Today, I would like to wish good luck to all my kind friends and colleagues at the Cannobio branch of the Italian Red Cross. This evening, after almost a year's study, they take the exam that qualifies them to answer medical emergencies of all kinds.

Cannobio, the Valle Cannobina and the whole area to the Swiss border, has no professional ambulance service. We rely on the volunteers of the Red Cross and the Mountain Rescue Service (often the same people) for medical emergency cover. Last year the call went out for new volunteers - the service was so stretched that it had come to the point that the Cannobio branch could no longer guarantee 24/7 service - at certain times emergency calls would have to be answered exclusively by ambulance crews from Verbania, 30 minutes away. 

And if you're dying of a heart attack, 30 minutes is - literally - a lifetime.

If all of tonight's volunteers pass - and the exam is pretty exacting - the new blood will help to rejuvenate the service so that the Red Cross can continue to save lives in this area.

And I have to say, having studied the 'First Step' with this group earlier this year, I have no problem trusting my life to any one of them. 

In bocca al lupo! 

Of men and boys

Last night's starry (shooting-starry) skies have left us minus-one shivery at eight this morning. More clear skies, and soothing sunshine. 

Saturday morning. One hour before sunrise. The ancient stones of Carmine Superiore lie silent in the winter cold. All is still. 

All but two muffled figures - one tall, one tiny - each carrying a mysterious bundle, stealing away quietly down the old pathway to the lake, keeping to the shadows and followed closely by two feline shapes. 

The village broods over the pair as they slip across the road and into a battered car. They gently pull onto the deserted statale and are soon lost amid the twists and turns of the Valle Cannobina. Soon the figure in the passenger seat is snoozing, as the driver takes the two of them expertly over the rise and into the Valle Vigezzo and beyond. 

Overhead, unseen, a meteor shower lights the sky.

As the sun rises, the pair, father and son, meet their contact at a rural farmstead lying beyond the last town, beyond the last village, beyond the last hamlet, at the very end of the valley. 


Rapidly and without too many words, the men manhandle a bodybag into the back seat and the car is once again away, this time taking the highway towards Omegna. In town, at an intersection, the driver signals discreetly to another in a stationary car, which immediately pulls out in front, leading the way. Plunging into the Omegna suburbs, they stop first at one house, then at another until at last there are six men. All carrying similar bundles. 

With each new arrival, the mood lifts until they are disgorged into a large cellar amid a festive spirit. The bag is lifted gently out of the World's Most Battered Panda, and the men start unbundling aprons and knives, opening bottles of homemade wine and starting in on the massive half-pig before them. 

In Piemonte, December is porker season - the traditional month for slaughtering pigs and making salami, sausages and other products. This particular fellow was reared free-range on an alp, and fed on the whey by-product of artisan cheese-making from the milk of the cows he shared the good life with. His death was swift and fear-free. And almost every part of him will be used. 

The sausages were made with only salt and spices - principally cinnamon - as additives, and believe me, they taste like no other pork I've ever eaten. Let's face it, they are probably the freshest I've ever eaten. There are 40 kilos of sausages hanging in the cellar right now, and I think Jakob! agrees with me on how good they are - every time he passes the cellar door, he points.

Here's to the big fellow. Here's to the kind friend who reared him, to all the guys who joined the gang last Saturday and brought their deboning knives with them. And finally to AJ, the boy who spent the day among the men and did such a great job loading up the sausage-machine.

Sunrise

Good weather for...

Bright sunshine. No wind. 

Weather for raking (yet more) leaves.

Playing in the meadow.

And admiring Carmine's newly-erected 2010 Albero di Natale (thanks to Franco who donated the tree, and to Giuliano and Fausto who helped with the hard work of putting it up and finding the one, single, broken light bulb...)...

The Sound of Music : but not at Victoria Station...

Thanks to Katie May over in Saskatchewan for making me smile with this...



Never in a million years could this happen at London Victoria, Euston, Paddington, St Pancras, King's Cross. The dancers would be trampled to death by the raging commuter hoardes ...!

Mea culpa

Bright sunshine, blue skies. Yesterday's gales have given up battering at Carmine Superiore's 1,000-year-old ramparts, and gone away, content with having knocked down a few trees.

I blame myself. 

We arrive home from school, a snarling rabble, all hungry, all tired, all fractious. I hear above the din the clarion call from the chicken coop - danger! danger! help! help!

I put the dog in his stable, the kids in the kitchen and go outside once more. And listen. 

Nothing. 

And like the menfolk in the village of the boy who cried wolf, I recall the many times I have run 500m uphill to the coop to find nothing amiss. I turn back indoors to light a wood fire in Edna the stove and start cooking a much-needed evening meal.

This morning, daylight brings a grisly sight. A dead cockerel. Minus throat and face. The remaining 14 huddled in the coop or gingerly skirting his stretched-out, ravaged body to come greet me in what seems like bewilderment. 

Two breaks in the wire. Way in. Way out. A hawk.

I move the corpse out of sight of the others.

Mea culpa.

I feed them generously and stroke their ruffled feathers.

Mea culpa.

I find some netting and close the gaps, all the time remembering the puffball chick I raised back in the spring, and the beautiful, lively young adult he had become.


Mea maxima culpa.

Al teatro dell'Oratorio - La Luna e il Topolino

Bright sunshine. Mean wind. White horses.

Yesterday, Mama and the Sprogs made good use of their Immaculate Conception holiday, not to go Christmas shopping like many, but to pay a visit to the Teatro dell'Oratorio attached to the church of San Giovanni Bosco in Minusio, Locarno. Here, we were treated to La Luna e il Topolino (The Mouse and the Moon), presented by the compagnia i Tiriteri, all the way from Florence, part of the 'Mini Spettacoli' series. 

A hit from the outset. First of all there was the theatre. With tippy-up seats. (If any one of my friends from the acting profession can tell me if they have a specific name, I'd be grateful.) Yes. Tippy-up seats. With tippy-up seats you can bounce - boing, boing, boing. You can crash - eeeek, thud, eeeek, thud, eeeek, thud. And you can squirm underneath to visit your friends in the row in front, possibly as a hungry crocodile - squiggle, scomp, squiggle, scomp. 

Then, of course, there was the darkness as the lights went down, and my strapping 6-year-old not-scared-of-anything boy can pretend terror and jump into his Mama's arms for a good, long, warm, Jo Malone-scented cuddle. 

Then came the story - a tale of a mouse's quest for a taste of the cheesy moon. Perfectly pitched for 3-7-year-olds. Bright colours, lots of funny faces, pretend stupidity, repetition, suspense and fun music that we could all clap and sing along to (listen on YouTube by clicking here).

"That man's mad," commented AJ between screams of laughter. "I want that mouse," added B (4) when she could catch her breath from bouncing with glee and shouting "formaggio!". They were riveted. Their cheeks shone with pleasure. They learned the chorus of the song in the click of a finger (would that homework were so easy), and they followed every word of the Italian.

And guess what? So did Mama! 

Jonathan Stylites

A tropical eight degrees at 2pm this Immaculate Conception. If you could walk in mist like fallen autumn leaves, today you'd be knee deep in it. The clouds hang so low over the lake you feel you have to duck in case you bang your head. In certain places and at certain times the mist dissolves into rain. 

This Jonathan picture is posted today to remind me of the last day of pure, bright sunshine, when I tool a seat on Cannobio's lungolago, next to the ferry port and read my book in the sun.

Ferry lookout, Cannobio.

Weather report

Damp and warmish. The snow has disappeared overnight as quietly as it came. All, that is, except for at the laghetto - a small pond in the middle of the woods - which remains iced over and dusted with white.

Book notes No. 38 : A Fair Maiden, Joyce Carol Oates

Above freezing. Grey and snowing. Here in Carmine Superiore, it can't decide whether to settle or not. At lake-level it's raining.

I seem to have known the name Joyce Carol Oates forever, but I think this novel is the first of hers I've read, picked up in a delay-struck airport lounge in a 4 for 3 pile. And what a revelation. 

Katya Spivak. Fifteen. Uneducated. Working class. Desperate for attention.

Marcus Kidder. Sixty-something. Trust-fund child. Sophisticated. Searching for... ?

And that question mark forms the backbone of this suspense-filled, acutely-observed, psychologically wrenching novel. What does Marcus Kidder want from Katya Spivak? And what, for that matter, does Katya Spivak want from Marcus Kidder? 

The story is set on the New Jersey shore, an area I know particularly well, and I instantly recognised the two worlds Oates describes: the blue-collar families without jobs, without books, without any star to live by but some misguided televised idea of the American dream, which seems to consist of the freedom to not-work but get wasted instead; and the rich and elegant, hiding in their compound-gardens, behind their high hedges, giving their names to libraries, and with the leisure to indulge. 

Oates writes here of the coming-of-age of a working class girl. Ignored by her siblings. Blackmailed and lied to by her mother. Treated coldly by her terrified-to-lose-it-all nouveau-riche summer-job employers. Made to feel she is something by her new friend. But what that something is, she cannot tell. A commodity to be bought? A child to be coerced? Or a 'real' person with valid feelings, thoughts, emotions, to be heard, to be valued, even loved? 

The Daily Mail called this book "A delightfully chilling and playful novella from a literary genius", and I'd second that. But it's more. It's also a minutely accurate vision of some of the terrors and uncertainties of growing up female in working class America. 

And my question is: why hasn't anybody yet given this woman the Nobel?    

Madonna in need of TLC

I'm without my thermometer, but given that the chickens' water is frozen for the first time this winter, I'd hazard a guess that today is the coldest yet. Morning overcast, late afternoon snowing.

Madonna and Child, Strada Cantonale, Brissago

I wonder what she's pointing at - not dropped sweet wrappers, I'll be bound!

Weather report

Cloudy - sunny - cloudy - sunny - cloudy - sunny - cloudy - sunny. About 4°.

Tell-tale

Damp and cold. Swags of heavy grey clouds sag over Lago Maggiore. Above 500m, the woods clothing the lakeside hills are sprinkled in fairy-dust, icing sugar snow. 

In our own neck of the woods, only patches of snow remain. In one there is a boot-print and a paw-print, whispering of yesterday's woodland excursion. A woman and her dog. Always together.

Weather report

Snowing wetly again here in Carmine. There's a sprinkling on the ground and the roofs, and I suppose from below we look quite pretty...