Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples [Hardcover]

Dan Hofstadter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 2005

A portrait of the sun-drenched volcanic city from an American who has lost his heart to the place and to a beguiling and mysterious Neapolitan woman.

Weaving the tale of an elusive romance with a vivid and haunting evocation of a legendary metropolis, Dan Hofstadter brilliantly reveals Naples to us. He is our guide to the dilapidated architectural beauty and the irrepressible theater of the city’s everyday life; the centuries-old festivals that regularly overtake the jumbled streets; the conversations in dialect that start in the cafés after work and continue into the night; the countless curio shops where treasures mingle with kitsch. And he brings to life on the page the natives he befriends, people whose gestures and superstitions seem as ancient as Vesuvius: a master baker who’d rather be playing the stock market; an agoraphobic aunt who must meddle by phone; and, always, Benedetta, the object of our narrator’s fascination and affections, and, like her lifelong home-city, at once inviting and unfathomable.

Hofstadter’s Naples is an amalgam of equivocal beauty, vestigial beliefs, betrayed resolves, and half-concealed secrets, a wounded city whose commonplace wonders are vividly conjured in this rich and lyrical book.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

New Yorker contributor Hofstadter (The Love Affair as a Work of Art) poignantly writes of the crowded streets of Naples, his love for the city and the local woman who captivates him. The author has long adored Naples's charm and travels to the city as an adult for a translation project. There, he divides his time among his work, exploring the city and meeting some eccentrically charming people. Naturally, he falls for one of them, the passionate and bold Benedetta, with her "unique blend of affection and defiance." Other people Hofstadter encounters become some of his best friends: stuttering, chain-smoking Gigi Attrice, who dreams of being an actor; wedding photographer Donato Bianchi, who knows the albums he creates may become his young clients' most prized possessions; and the brainy Signora Perna, who believes unabashedly in the other world. Alas, Hofstadter's assignment ends, and he's forced to leave his newfound friends to return to America. Several years later he returns, spurred by a peculiar letter from Benedetta. Although it takes him a while to find her—"no one could find her until she wanted to be found"—they eventually reunite. With enticing descriptions and backstories, Hofstadter adroitly captures both the allure and sorrow of Naples and its people.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

A cynic might assume that with Rome and Tuscany overrun with tourists (and memoirs), Naples is the next logical hot spot. But there's nothing logical about Naples, and this highly personal story finds its author on solid (if slightly volcanic) ground. Critics praise the evocation of place, the lively characterizations, and above all, "the exquisite precision of Mr. Hofstadter's prose" (Wall Street Journal). If he glosses over some of Naples's problems (heavy unemployment, drugs, and the Neapolitan mafia, the camorra), he does so with the myopia of a lover—focusing on the city's beauty at the expense of some of its nagging vices.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition. states edition (November 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375414401
• ISBN-13: 978-0375414404
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,185,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NAPLES OBSERVED - A WISE, WITTY MEMOIR, December 14, 2005

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples (Hardcover)

Don Hofstadter, author of the thoroughly enjoyable "The Love Affair As A Work Of Art," is totally smitten with Naples, "that beautiful and wounded city." He loves the winding streets with their perilous staircases, he loves bassi (very small street level flats), he loves the people, most of all Benedetta, and he shares this deep affection with us in energetic, elegant prose. "Falling Palace" is a memoir, yes, it's also a paean to the city that for generations has withstood occupation, war, and the whims of Vesuvius.

For Hofstadter, Naples is "a place best or perhaps only grasped through myth and memory and half-remembered dream." He had many a dream during his sojourn there, dreams he tried to decipher, discover their hidden meanings. Perhaps those were attempts to find his place in Naples and in the life of Benedetta. She is an enigma, a beautiful mysterious woman often given to superstition, frequently argumentative, yet she holds him in thrall.

Unlike many short term residents of a foreign city, Hofstadter takes great pains to learn not only the language but the idioms and hand gestures. He notes that tapping the nose with a finger means something smells fishy or pulling down an eyelid indicates that one should keep one's eyes open. All of this observation is done with joy as he happily mimics the latest sign he has learned.

Word painted descriptions of Naples, the way the light plays on the buildings at eventide or the scorching of the noon day sun are artfully rendered, yet it is the Neapolitans themselves who are the heartbeat of the city and of this memoir. Hofstadter was fortunate in making so many friends from whom he learned a great deal. There is Gigi, a "theater person with dyed-blonde porcupine like hair" who schooled him in the Neopolitan dialect, and his landlady, Nunzia Perna, who had lived through the war's bombings. Two brothers, avid spelunkers who have spent their lives exploring the underground avenues that can be tracked throughout the cit introduced him to this hidden terrain.. There are many more friends and acquaintances, of course, all with stories to tell.

There are no answers in this wise and witty memoir, simply observations that illuminate one man's quest. Hofstadter has often journeyed to the city of his heart. Fortunate is the reader who shares a visit with him.

- Gail Cooke

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bellissimo!, December 7, 2005

By 

Robert DELUCCA "rd" (NYC, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples (Hardcover)

This marvelously written memoir is very funny and extremely poignant. It captures a foreigner's love of one of the world's most peculiar places perfectly. It's also full of masterly character studies worthy of Dickens or Greene. Deserves to be a bestseller. Buy it, you can't go wrong.

RD

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rare and Marvelous Memoir, June 21, 2007

By 

A reader (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples (Paperback)

This book is absorbing and fascinating in content, in addition to being extremely well written. It's full of insights into problematical personal relationships, and also into perhaps the ultimate, complicated personal relationship: that between a foreigner and the city with which (and in which) he falls in love.

Naples is my least favorite among Italian cities, and this author didn't convince me to go there, but he presents Naples and its inhabitants most vividly, in all their complexity and ambiguity. While many foreign memoirists, and even ex-pats like the insufferable Frances Mayes, remain on the surface of the societies where they take up residence, confining their contacts mainly to other foreigners and treating most Italians as servants, Hofstadter lives and loves among the ordinary people of Naples, sharing their discomforts as well as their pleasures. His title is understandable, too--the "falling palace" that appears in one of his dreams is a metaphor of Naples itself-- always falling apart and yet never destroyed.