Secrecy
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2014:“He came on a November day, a cold wind blowing, the fields soaked with rain.” With that opening line we’re introduced to Zummo, the mysterious Sicilian sculptor whose specialty is dioramas of death: wax figures of dead and dying plague victims, with rats tugging at their entrails. “I’m interested in corruption and decay,” he explains. Set in Florence, in the late 1600s, Zummo is commissioned by the Grand Duke to create a wax sculpture of a woman to replace his wife, the Duchess (who hates her husband and has fled the royal manor). British writer Rupert Thomson’s characters are fantastically comical or creepy or weird: an imperious nobleman who rolls “syllables on his tongue like pieces of soft fruit”; a menacing black-robed priest (“slippery, reptilian”); a beautiful apothecary girl of suspicious lineage; a gossipy house boy with a missing ear named, of course, Earhole. Packed with enough lies, betrayals, jealousies, couplings, and secrets to rival, say, Congress, this is a rich and delicious book that reads more like a brainy mystery than “historical.” That’s not a dig at the historical bits. The recreation of life on the dangerous streets of Renaissance Florence is masterful. Says the sculptor (again, a line that could apply to Congress): “I’d never lived in a place where paranoia was so completely justifiable.” Maybe I’m easy to please, or I’m a sucker for micro-scenes like the royal librarian who walks away from a Jesuit scholar and a few monks, mutters “nest of vipers” and chomps into a hard-boiled egg. I’m also a sucker for Thomson’s language: palace floors are “voluptuous with dust,” an old woman smells of “famine breath,” a man’s privates are referred to as “Your root. Your yard. Your pego.” Famine in the countryside, an earthquake, love and death and disturbing works of art… I loved it all.--Neal Thompson