Floria [Paperback]

Paola Capriolo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1997

Puccini's "Tosca" is the starting point for this novel, which explores power and erotic obsession. Narrated by the feared Baron Scarpia, events unfold in the police chief's lair, the torture chamber, the theatre and its stage. Horror is mixed with darkly farcical humour.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Opera lovers are no doubt familiar with the story of Tosca: a beautiful young singer leaps to her death from the walls of Rome's Castel Sant'Angelo after her lover, a painter, is executed due to the machinations of an evil baron. What in opera is essentially melodrama--however beautifully scored--becomes a gripping, intricate drama in Paola Capriolo's brilliant novel Floria Tosca. Capriolo retells this story from the villain's point of view, at the same time presenting it in historical context. The time is 1800, the place Rome, and Napoleon's armies are set on conquering Italy. Rather than focusing on the political derring-do of doomed painter Cavaradossi or his loyal paramour, Tosca, Capriolo turns her attention to Baron Scarpia, a police chief who tortures political prisoners and eventually sets in motion the lovers' deaths. Scarpia's complex character is slowly revealed through the auspices of his diary, a work that exposes not only his growing obsession with Tosca but also the dominant philosophies--both religious and social--of the times.

In literature, a good villain can always outshine a worthy hero--witness the popularity of Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost--and this is certainly the case in Floria Tosca. Tosca and her painter might be heroic, but in choosing to focus on the wicked baron's twisted psyche, his ambivalence toward Tosca's charms, and his justification for the torture he imparts, Capriolo has created a fictional character that will live on in the reader's imagination long after the book has been read.

Review

An essential part of this novel's success is Capriolo's elegant writing, a highly readable evocation of 19th-century Italian prose style. The British writer Liz Heron fashions a remarkably suggestive English version that never fails to match Capriolo's archaisms and often adds to them with inventive choices.... In these enhancements of the period flavor, Heron's translation manages to be both artful and absorbing. -- The New York Times Book Review, Lawrence Venuti

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (July 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852423811
• ISBN-13: 978-1852423810
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,333,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars TOSCA TRIUMPHANT, April 30, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Floria (Paperback)

In Floria Tosca, Paola Capriolo has captured the dark essence of Sardou's Tosca most perfectly. Told exclusively from the viewpoint of Baron Scarpia, chief of police, this extraordinarily elegant tale recounts the consequences of people who are driven to go to far: people who cross the line, step over the threshold, give way to dark passions that might be better served if held in check. Although Floria Tosca is an erotic tale of sadist and masochist, Capriolo's rendering is so perfect we cannot fail to be amazed at the balance she strikes between love and hate, abstinence and desire, pleasure and pain. Everything about this book is perfect: the characterizations, the pacing, the restrained melodrama, and most especially, Capriolo's elegantly archaic prose. She writes in such a way that we can't help but believe we are truly reading the words of Scarpia, himself, words he set down in his own hand on a mid-summer's night in 1860s Rome. The fact that Cavarodossi never appears "onstage" is a credit to Capriolo, for he is never missed. It is the erotically passionate interplay between Tosca and Scarpia that forms the real heart and soul of this story. Opera lovers can't fail to fall in love with Floria Tosca. And even those who've never seen an opera will be astonished at the eloquence of Capriolo's style. If I had to sum this book up in only one word, the only word I could choose would be, perfection.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Move over, Sardou!, May 9, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Floria (Paperback)

Would that Puccini had based his opera on Paola Capriolo's brilliant rendering of the Tosca story rather than on Sardou's Grand Guignol melodrama! Even in the opera, though Cavaradossi has the most beautiful arias, he is a nonentity compared with Scarpia and Tosca -- imagine him completely off-stage, as he is in "Floria Tosca," take that grinding, inexorable crescendo of horror in the second act music and hear it in Scarpia's "Paradise," and enter the tortured mind of that brilliant villain as he pursues not Cavaradossi or Angelotti, but the Madonna/whore he sees in Tosca. Capriolo has perfectly captured the language, tone, and philosophies of time of Napoleon, and Liz Heron's translation rings beautifully true.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love-Death, November 24, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Floria (Paperback)

Warning: Capriolo's "Tosca" performs open heart surgery on melodrama, pulls back the scrim, dries the blurry tears of sentiment, to show that the core appeal of Puccini's opera is to the death-wish. The author must have composed the novella with her ear on Callas and her eye on Nietzsche and Freud. This is a diabolically beautiful novella, which can be read in about the time it takes to listen to the final act of "Tristan and Isolde" -- but read preferably by candlelight.