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The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

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"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.

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.

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?"

The first three words in the title might have told me something about Ms.Cusk but I was unprepared for her unhappiness with the values of others. You might share her biases--even find them reinforcing--but after 10 pages you may also tire of her metaphors, analogies and other descriptive excesses. I bought it to read on travel to Tuscany but discarded it by the time we reached Heathrow. We were on our way to a magical family celebration--wish she might have had a more positive life and story to tell. (I read Russell Baker's "Growing Up" on the same trip--a beautiful contrast to Ms Cusk's unhappy memoir.)

"The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy" by Rachel Cusk is a travelogue about a summer the author spent in Italy along with her husband and two young children.

The book is organized into 13 chapters, which are both themed and chronological. Cusk begins the book in England as her family is packing up their home. They take the ferry to France, spend a number of days driving through France, and eventually arrive in Italy. Much of the time is spent in a house they rent in eastern Tuscany. Toward the end of the summer they head to the south of Italy and visit Naples and Pompeii along with several other towns. Then finally, they reverse course and make their way back to England.

It took me a while to adjust to this book's rhythm. It's slow moving, with little dialogue. The lack of dialogue isn't unusual for a travelogue, but I found it oddly distracting in the first few chapters. She also focuses a bit too much on art. There were too many details about too many paintings.

In the middle of the book, Cusk includes a chapter on food. That chapter pushed aside doubts I had about the book. She doesn't discuss specific dishes, but instead describes her perception of food in Italy and how she thinks Italians perceive their own food. Italians are proud of their food, and rightly so. And as Cusk points out, Italian food is not the least bit pretentious - even her young children love the food. Italian food, to me, does seem to be the very heart of Italian culture, a reflection on the lifestyle, which is just the opposite of the fast food lifestyle so common in the US.

As I continued to read this book, I began to enjoy it more. Cusk's prose is haunting. The book needs to be read slowly to be fully enjoyed. That seems appropriate, because when I've been in Italy, it's the slow days I enjoy the most, not the days of running from museum to museum. (Italy isn't the best place for that frantic tourist pace.) Cusk also captures, rather humorously, the feeling of seeing whole busloads of tourists, one right after another. For the independent traveler, those big groups can be overwhelming, and they seem so separate from the independent traveler. Overall, I enjoyed this slow journey through Italian culture, food, and countryside.

This book arrived in the mail a few weeks ago from LibraryThing. It's a memoir of a time the author spent traveling around Italy with her husband and two young children. I like travel stories, usually, but this one was quite different from my typical travel story. Cusk seems removed from the story, aloof, distant. Her children are not named, for example, and do not feel like people but concepts. Cusk is vague about the reasons for her trip to Italy and even more unclear about what she took away from the experience. As a result, I felt disassociated from the story and the characters as well.

I expected to like `The Last Supper - A Summer in Italy much more than I ultimately did. When I first read the blurb on the back, it seemed to promise everything I would enjoy ... a personal-style memoir, a family trip to an exotic locale - namely Italy, with its heritage of wonderful food, beautiful locations and inspiring art. However, the book never lived up to that promise.

Rachel Cusk undertook the summer trip to Italy with her husband and two young children as a way to stave off the boredom and tiresomeness of her life in England. Sadly, she seemed to have taken that boredom with her, carried it around for the entire trip and ultimately wrote a book about it.

I have to be honest and say that I ended up skimming some parts of it, when the utter depressiveness of Cusk's descriptions of particularly the people she met began to fight with my desire to finish the book. None of the people in Cusk's book come alive in any way at all. Everyone, including her husband and children, seem to be cardboard cutouts, and there is no way to relate to them in the least. The people who the family meets during their trip are all strange, vaguely frightening, and not particularly likeable either. The author appears to be at once bored with and slightly contemptuous of all of them. That makes for a ponderous read that felt like a lot of hard work for not much reward.

The one redeeming thing about this book is the descriptions of the art which the family have also gone in search of, in order to bring some kind of beauty back to their lives. Cusk seems to have saved all her passion for the artwork, the descriptions of which are wonderful and fascinating, making me want to see them for myself. The book thus might appeal more to a lover of art than someone who wanted more of a story relating the family's feelings about their experience.

This memoir tells of the travels of Rachel Cusk and her family during the spring and summer of 2006. They left their home in England and spent their time exploring life in Italy. This book is not so much a travel journal as it is a series of ruminations on what life is and is not.

It took me several pages to become accustomed to Ms. Cusk's writing style. It is so chock full of similes and metaphors that I was constantly reminded that I was reading a book. There are some thoughtful phrases, some interesting thoughts on life and art, but this is not a book that most people will enjoy. Ms. Cusk was just too cranky during her summer away from England.