The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples
*Starred Review* Hazzard is a highly acclaimed Australian novelist, her most recent book the celebrated and provocative World War II novel Great Fire (2003); the late Steegmuller was a renowned Flaubert scholar and Hazzard’s husband. Their book speaks in two different voices, Hazzard writing about the city of Naples as a “victim” of the still-active Mount Vesuvius, about why sensitive people gravitate to Italy, and about travel as a personal pilgrimage. Steegmuller, on the other hand, writes more personally, about a mugging he experienced in crime-prone Naples a few years back. But the two voices join in exquisite harmony to celebrate “those of us who first came to Italy in the 1950s and were more than lucky; we were blessed.” Blessed, that is, with indelible impressions, for “the day was an adventure of discoveries, mortal and immortal, inward or external, and occasionally somber.” A lovely book. --Brad Hooper