14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An Odd View of Italy, September 23, 2009
This review is from: The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (Hardcover)
"The Last Supper" is a bizarre little book illustrating that almost any literate person with a travel experience can become published. What was most striking about the book was the puzzling undercurrent of disdain and hostility that the author, Rachel Cusk, expressed toward so much of what she saw and who she met during a 3-month sojourn in Italy with her husband and two children. I say this from a first-hand perspective because in four trips to Italy I've personally and recently visited many of the venues she describes (Rome, Florence, Assisi, Naples). For example, she describes the face of the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi as "blank and pagan-looking, frightening in its enormity . . ." Its "long, forbidding colonnaded walkway extends from its side, like the huge dark wing of a bird of prey." All that remains of St. Francis himself, she adds, "are the bones that lie in the basilica's cold heart." As she descends from the upper basilica, "The shushing and the hostile stares come thick and fast through the gloom, for it is in the lower church that the bones lie, and the closer we get to them the more vigorously art is derided. I begin to feel a little outraged. It is they who seem heretical to me, these spiritual bureaucrats with their rules and regulations, their punitive demeanor and their threats of expulsion." Cusk went to a Catholic convent school. Maybe that explains the prism through which she looks at things, but I wouldn't know.
Her dismissive views extend to the secular, as well. She describes the throngs of tourists at Pompeii as "these herds who drive around in coaches, looking numbly down on the world. They are not art lovers. They aren't even really tourists. They are voyeurs." Wow, I didn't know I was voyeur when I walked in amazement through Pompeii, but I've been put in my place.
Cusk gives a tedious account of a tennis game with an English expatriate in her typically overwrought style: "Jim hits the ball with a spastic gesture, a movement almost private in its incoherence, like a grimace or a madman's twitch. From far down at the other end we watch its progress, rooted to the spot with disbelief. Slowly, stricken, the ball makes it way to the net, lumbering and low-flying, and when it has limped over it tumbles directly to earth and lies there amid the black mesh skirts." My first thought after reading that passage was, who cares? The description of the tennis game, by the way, goes on for parts of four pages, and compares to numerous other accounts of similar trivia.
Cusk's saturnine outlook seems reflected by her refusal to even mention the names of her husband and children, who were with her on a daily basis during her trip. They remain nameless throughout the book. Does that seem strange to you, or is it just me?
What readers may value, and what originally attracted me to the book, were the author's accounts of some of Italy's art treasures. The book includes 14 illustrations of works of Italian art, principally paintings. Here, Cusk gives some interesting insights, albeit from the perspective of one who appreciates art from a lay perspective. Perhaps true art critics may view her critiques with the same disdain she seems to have for much of the world. These accounts represent perhaps a fifth of the book, which mostly details the daily minutia of the family's travels.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
don't waste your time on this one, March 2, 2010
This review is from: The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (Hardcover)
The art information was the only good part of this book. The Mother in this book (the author) was toooooo critical of everyone and every thing. I don't have any trouble finding people to gripe, I don't need to read a whole book of gripes, or stinging opinions.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
What's the point?, August 8, 2010
The Last Supper is a memoir by Rachel Cusk of a summer spent in Italy with her husband and two children. I could not connect with the author in this book at all. She shares no background information or any personal information about her or her family and writes in a very detached, dreamy style. She never even refers to her daughters by name, just "the children". In reading a memoir, I expect to be able to form some kind of connection with the author and I felt none with Rachel.
Her metaphors are very creative but she spends paragraphs describing the minutest things in very descriptive, melodramatic detail and never really gets to the point. And that's what I wondered when I finally made it to the end, "What was the point?"
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