Michelle Lovric – The Book of Human Skin

12 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Fiction, Historical Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Reading

Tags

Book Review, Gothic Fiction, Michelle Lovric, Peru, The Book of Human Skin, Venice

Gothic, Grand-Guignol, Grisly, Grim and Gorgeous!

Good Heavens! Michelle Lovric has a rich, inventive imagination, steeps herself in research, wears it lightly, and overflows with a kind of earthy vitality that seems to belong to an earlier century and indeed to be more akin to South American literature than English literature. Or it may just be the time and the place she is writing about

The marvellous Book of Human Skin is set in Venice, and also in Peru, or what later became Peru, at the tail end of the eighteenth century, up to and beyond Napoleon’s death on St. Helena in 1821

The book is written in 5 voices, each of which is excellently delineated. Two of them are quite definitely of the devil’s party, even though one of them is a deranged nun who believes she is due to ascend in beatitude, and 3 are most definitely on the side of the angels

Minguello Fasan, born in 1784 is a vile, sadistic, sneering, puffed up and very funny scion of the house of Fasan. He bears more than a passing resemblance to the monstrously compelling central character of Patrick Susskind’s Perfume. Minguello, right from the start has a whiff of brimstone about him, and whether by nature or by nurture is determined to express that fully. He is the second born of the house, and aware of the dislike in which everyone holds him, including his parents, is determined to inherit all his family’s substantial riches. And he is a passionate collector of books which are bound in Human Skin.

Unlike Marcella’s my flesh proved insultingly mortal. The damaged finger turned yellow, then red and then black…..In the end Surgeon Ruggiero unceremoniously lopped the digit off. I had lost my index finger, my pointing finger, my stabbing-on-the-table-to-prove-a-point finger, my eye-poking, shame-slitting finger. I kept it in a box until the worms found it

Marcella Fasan is his younger sister. Born with a congenital weakness, she is initially loved by all, (except Minguello who loves no one) and almost immediately becomes the next target of Minguello’s sadism and ire (something happens to his older sibling) Marcella is intelligent, a gifted wielder of the pen and pencil, loyal, loving, resourceful and refuses to accept the role Minguello assigns her (dead through his many designs)

My pencil began to reveal fear in people’s eyes when they beheld me – me, the slightest, least fearsome creature imaginable. Even my hair was soft like chicken-down. The very cartilege of my nose was transclucent in the sunshine. But that, I was learning, is what frightens people: creatures who are weaker and rarer than themselves. I drew caricatures of elegant baboons, their eyes and tails askew with terror – fleeing from a tiny mouse – with my features – in a wheeled chair

Gianni delle Boccole is bright, devoted to Marcella, but appears a dolt. By circuitous means he learned to read (though most assume him illiterate); he is Marcello’s valet. Though he can read, he can barely write, and certainly has a more than usually phonetic grasp of spelling. Initially, his often hugely funny misspellings were a little irritating or contrived, but by the third or fourth of Gianni’s tellings of the tale, I was sold on him. And some of the tale is so dark and seamy than the levity of unintentional writos are a relief!

Swear my old Master Fernando give the boy babe one long look and betook himself to the furthest corner o the world. He were that shamed to be the author o sich an abdomenashun as Minguello Fasan, Great Canary ovva God!

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini is a poor young orphan, with a desperate desire to help and heal, and a large and tender heart, who gets himself, by hook or by crook, apprenticed to learn the craft of physic.

My famous patient, Napoleon, suffered his first attack of dysuria at the Battle of Marengo in 1800. I never got quite close enough myself to make a personal diagnosis, but they say his urinary pain was a terrible thing to behold. He would lean against a tree, moaning as he tried to relieve himself of a burning liquid clotted with sediments. His men rather admired his symptoms, which seemed those of an amatory complaint

These four start their journey in Venice, a proud, patrician, sophisticated, urbane, cultured – not to mention decadent (according to some) – state, whose fortunes will be changed by Napoleon.

Sor Loreta, the deranged, delusional nun, dreams of becoming a martyr, a saint, and the prioress of Santa Catalina, Arequipa, in modern day Peru

Arequipa, Peru, Santa Catalina convent

I contented myself with Santa Catalina. She knew she was married to Christ, for she received a vision in which she wore as a wedding ring the Holy Prepuce…..When she was just a child she threw herself into the boiling waters of a spring near her house in order to burn the skin of her face and body and so discourage human suitors……When they took my Santa Catalina away too, my soul rebelled inside my body. I scrubbed my face with the pepper and lye that I had hidden in my bureau drawer

Another way of looking at these five (and there are many other equally ebullient characters who might almost have strayed from Balzac or even Rabelais) might be in the tradition of some of Rossini’s operas. And I’m sure this is deliberate, on Lovric’s part, as another character, the kindly prioress of Santa Catalina, whom the deranged Sor Loreta is desperate to eliminate and supplant, is devoted to Rossini’s music (not all nuns are quite the dour characters which the outside world thinks they might be)

In this, Marcella and Santo are of course the young lovers (Rosina, Almaviva/Lindoro) (Santo, like Almaviva in The Barber of Seville is expert in disguise in order to gain the enemy stronghold to meet his truly beloved) Gianni, valet, is Figaro, and Minguello the much more wicked version of the merely buffoonish Doctor Bartolo, and the equally sadistic Sor Loreta a notched up version of the prim Berta,

Act I Finale mayhem, production by Ponelle, Hermann Prey as Figaro, Teresa Berganza as Rosina, Luigi Alva as Almaviva

This is a glorious, twisty, turny (utterly credible within its own reality) plot. Characters that make sense in place and time. Humour which is as dark as you like, but, overall, an explosion of intelligence, vivacity, inventiveness and originality.

Saint Sebastian by Gerrit van Honthorst, circa 1623

As you can tell, I like Lovric rather a lot, following my earlier read of her later novel, involving the wonderfully tressed Irish sisters The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

Photo of Lovric by Marianne Taylor, from Lovric’s website

The 466 page novel is followed by a much soberer and more explanatory 30 page afterword by Lovric, where she lays out the factual aspects of her book, and where she departed from the facts. In essence, all the historical information IS there, but may have been woven in a unique way by Lovric. The dots are in place, she does the joining.

I think I’ve gone off reading ‘wood books’ and will stick to the less potentially dangerous Kindled editions. Readers of this will understand my new sensitivities……….

The Book of Human Skin Amazon UK
The Book of Human Skin Amazon USA

Michelle Lovric – The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

06 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by Lady Fancifull in Fiction, Literary Fiction, Reading

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Tags

Book Review, Dublin, Michelle Lovric, The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, Venice, Victorian set fiction

Story, character, setting and language as ebullient as those flowing tresses

Lovric Hair book Michelle Lovric’s ‘The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters’ is a book which almost appropriates the adjective ‘fecund’ to itself by way of description, so much does its language teem with rich, sappy, loamy, fruitfulness, even to a glorious abandon of excess.

Set in the mid 1860’s, starting in rural Southern Ireland, then moving mainly between Dublin and Venice, the Harristown seven Swiney sisters are impoverished young girls with a particular gift – each has a seductive, ostentatious, over-abundant cascade of twisty, tumbling, seductive Pre-Raphaelite tresses, reaching, when loose to between 4 and 5 feet long.

This is at a time when women’s hair was bound, confined, and kept private and well-controlled. But, unbound, that hair was the repository of lust and desire, fetishism and secret libido.

Lady Lilith. Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The sisters can also sing. Their lustrous hair and their performance skills are a potential exit from the world of poverty, And also a potential route for them to both exploit and, mainly, be the ones exploited. The sisters are wonderfully named, and wonderfully, richly, characterised. They are the raven haired, dark hearted Darcy, twins Berenice and Enda, violent enemies to each other, Pertilly who would have been happy to stay a homebody in the kitchen, limpid blonde Oona, Idolatry (Ida) the youngest, a little simple and disturbed, with a feel for the violin, and the lustrous, creative, flame haired Manticory, who narrates this rollicking tale and is the writer of the shows they are forced into performing.

This forcing comes initially from Darcy, who rules her sisters with cruel words, slaps and punches and has a fierce quest for riches and power, but also, there are a little cluster of men who find ways, both sexual and financial, to exploit the sisters.

This is a Gothic, operatic book by virtue of the intensity of feeling and opulence, sumptuousness of language, the reaching of heights of ecstasy, the plummeting the darkness of jealousy, violence, betrayal and murder. But the whole is delivered with such vivacity, such joyousness and juicy humour and playfulness of language that it becomes a wild, frolicsome read, despite the savage undercurrents.

And lest the term ‘Gothic’ should fret potential readers who might fear the pages may romp with werewolves vampires zombies and such other silly company – fear not, the ‘Gothic’ relates to the architecture of the language, full of delicious crenellations and furbelows. There ARE monsters within these pages, and they are all of a very human kind, with no need for the agency of magic.

It is (particularly in the earlier part of the book, before the sisters attempt to raise themselves – or Darcy whips them into raising themselves – into society) the richness of Irish rhythms and vernacular, the daily heightened delight in turn of phrase, the lovely wicked language which grabbed me into this book.

Here is the devilish (but caustically FUNNY) Darcy, in a typical insult for insult match with the archest of all her arch enemies, ‘the Eileen O’Reilly, the butcher’s runt’

May the fishes eat you, you dirty little spalpeen! And then the worms eat the fishes. And the worms wither their guts on the nastiness of your bits inside of them’
‘Here’s at you! A burning and a scorching on ye!’ was the runt’s retort
‘I will plant a tree in your dirty ear’ shouted Darcy’and slap you in its shade’
‘It is yerself that filthied me ear wid the great black tongue on ye, so it is.’
‘Stones on your meaty bones!’
Then the runt wished black sorrow of Darcy’s guardian angel ‘all red-eyed from shame at havin’ to do wid ye!’

I’m afraid I was snorting and chuckling out loud with periodic bouts of such inventive insulting

The book was inspired by an American group of fabulously haired sisters, at the tail end of the nineteeth century, who had a similar rags to riches and fall from grace journey, linked with exploitation, by men who saw they could be manipulated into being cash cows. They too were clearly eccentric, individual, fascinating, tragic, and lived operatically.