The novel as guidebook

As someone who spent twenty years as a semi-resident of Italy, I am sometimes given a book with an Italian setting in the hope that I will find it interesting.  Though that is not necessarily so, my most recent acquisiton of this kind - Jonathan Buckley’s Nostalgia - was clearly chosen with the knowledge that I no longer have my apartment there and must grieve over the loss of it.  Irrespective of this, it’s a novel I have liked very much, particularly for its structure, which embeds the story - that of an English painter who lives in a small Tuscan town, partly for inspiration but also to escape from relatives back home with whom he has fallen out - in a scrupulously assembled selection of Italian anecdotage inserted in the course of the 434 pages of the book. 

These serve as intermezzi dealing with the history of the place where the painter lives, the people (going back centuries) who have lived there, the local buildings, the animal or insect life (bees, bats, porcupines, wild boars) that might be encountered. As author of the Rough Guide to Tuscany and Umbria, Buckley knows all about the area between Siena and Volterra where his fictional, or semi-fictional, town is positioned. Whether you find these chapter-length interludes gripping, or simply a tease that tends to hold up the action (obviously a risk in a novel such as this), they add their own special flavour to what could come to be described as a novel as guidebook.

Yet the tale of Gideon Westfall and his young assistant Robert Bancourt, one of whose duties is to deter visitors, is perfectly strong in its own right. When Gideon’s stubborn, somewhat querulous niece Claire comes calling from London one summer, complications ensue. If you are lucky, or sufficiently patient, you will enjoy the book both for the story and the interludes (the one on Italian bees, added after the niece has suffered a dangerous sting, struck me as particularly arresting). In any case you can always skip, as I occasionally did, even if it made me feel a bit guilty to do so. 

In Buckley’s hands, a novel such as this becomes a new experience and he has made it work, even though he has needed a sympathetic publisher, aptly called Sort of Books, to encourage him.  It comes with an introductory  quotation from Arnold Schoenberg:  “There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major,” which also strikes me as apt, One of the characters is a vanguard Danish composer to whose works, described with a perception not always supplied by other novelists whose books touch on the subject of music, a local concert is hilariously devoted.

The shop price of Buckley’s Nostalgia is £12.99, though Amazon sell it for £8.96 and the easy-to-handle Kindle version costs £3.90.

17 June 2014