Customer Reviews

Lost Hearts in Italy: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Andrea's Lee's strikingly redolent Lost Hearts in Italy mines the murky waters of betrayal, infidelity and misplaced passion. Her central character is Mira Ward, an attractive African American who has recently married Nick Reiver, a blonde and blue-eyed Old New England banker. College sweethearts, the young couple almost at once, fall terribly in love. Affluent and upwardly mobile, Nick and Mira seem to be blessed with everything.

At the beginning if the novel, it is the early 1980's and the extremely ambitious Nick has just been offered a post in Italy, determined to pursue his career in international finance. His firm treats Mira and she decides to join him in Rome. On the flight, however, she's upgraded to first-class section where she meets Zenin, a billionaire working class Italian industrialist.

The attraction isn't instant, but the misogynistic and grandiloquent Zenin seems intent to seduce this exotic and striking dark-skinned beauty. Somewhat naïve and also quite flattered, Mira gives him her number, not thinking he'll call, but when he eventually does phone, the rest of the world recedes and she simply lets him into her life as though it's nothing more than a flicker of impulse, a flash of idle curiosity.

Mira inexplicably throws herself into the affair, for no good reason, apart from the fact that her thoughts grow dark and jumbled when she thinks of herself alone in Rome when Nick flies off to start work. Mira sinks her roots into a country feeling almost like the heroine of a melodrama, whereas Zenin - with is old-world ways - treats her like a sexual object, intent prop up his unhealthy dependence for physical reinforcement than any emotional security.

The affair continues on until Nick eventually discovers the betrayal, all three of the still to pursue their own selfish agendas. Two decades alter they're all still alive, widely separated, no longer "hagridden by lust and jealousy," grown older and lazier, and less exacting about their pleasures.

Mira immerses herself in the controlled chaos of a new family and work, and recollects the affair with a type of whimsical nostalgia, not so much for love "but for being young" Nick has a beautiful second wife and two girls besides their own daughter Maddie, and has hidden himself amongst the glass and steel corporate wilderness of Canary Wharf or Wall Street. Whilst Zenin has encapsulated himself in his money and prestige, "the vast yet hermetic universe of product wealth and chance."

From city to city, London, Venice, Rome, New York and Hong Kong, all three of these characters are linked by the glorious egotistical certainty of living a betrayal unique in the world. Lee tells her story through shifting perspectives, not just through Mira, Nick and Zenin, but also through various minor players - a sister, a brother, a waiter, even an airline steward - as she steadily builds a defensive wall of memories, a gallery of life in two continents.

Much of the novel involves Mira's moneyed recollections as she looks at the life she has rebuilt in Northern Italy when she left Rome and the ruins of the first marriage, and the love affair. Defined by materialistic needs rather than any meaningful connection to the world, her existence was indeed controlled by glamour, wealth and prestige. Nick realized early on that he could never hope to compete with Zenin and he ends up collapsing the metropolis of certainty when he realizes Zenin is just too powerful a force in Mira's life.

Lost Hearts in Italy is obviously a love story, but it's also a rather scathing indictment on the wealthy and their penchant for instant gratification. In their youths, Zenin, Nick and Mira had one thing in common besides a susceptibility to passion - a rather stubborn, bourgeois attachment to life and its consolations. In contrast, their middle age has somewhat tempered them, everything is now cushioned with a relativity, going beyond forgiveness and bitterness. Mike Leonard October 06.

This novel showed the beautiful scenery of Italy with visual descriprions that took my breath way. The characters however, I could have cared less about them. This young Harvard graduate marrying this beautiful woman he met at college seems plausable but what happens when they move to Italy is more of what a Hollywood movie is made of and usually sells a lot of tickets out of curiosity. The woman falls for a very wealthy, what I think to be a homunculus man (even though he was described as being tall). I have and still do not understand why the attraction was so great. I can only guess she was overwhelmed by his wealth and fasinated by his uncaring attittude. The whole thing did not even make sense to me which made it hard for me to read. I only finished it because when my husband was stationed in Italy, it descibed the scenery so vividly. I was not married to him at the time and I was so taken by the country and its people. Which by the way, the author really had a handle on. I think maybe she should write a travel log for tourists. She would be excellent at it. Forget the people part.

Lost Hearts in Italy is the story of a pair of American Harvard graduate newlyweds, Mira and Nick, who move to Rome. Mira meets Italian billionaire Zenin on the flight to Italy and they are immediately intrigued by one another. After many months of "courtship", they commence an affair which eventually destroys her marriage.

The story is supposedly told from the perspectives of the three main characters - Mira, Nick and Zenin - in both the present day (2004) and flashbacks to the mid 1980s. I say "supposedly" because each section is still written in the third person and you don't necessarily get much sense of how they are feeling at any given time, just what is happening to them. The current day sections are fairly tedious as nothing ever happens in them, just endless variations on Nick feeling bitter about Mira, Zenin feeling wistful about Mira and Mira feeling ambivalent about her current husband. There are also contributions from various bystanders or friends who feature in each chapter with their perspective on some element of the chapter's events - again, this adds little.

Andrea Lee has an elegant turn of phrase. However her character development and plot are woeful. I was totally indifferent to what happened to these people - I didn't like or care about any of them in the slightest. Moreover, when I finished the book, I still didn't have any sense of key plot elements such as why Mira decided to have an affair, what she thought of Zenin, what Nick thought was going on, why she considered herself Italian, what terms her relationship with Zenin ended on. I was also irritated by the countless references to Harvard and/or 19th century literature which seemed only there to let you know how well read and educated Andrea Lee is.

I am reading this for a book club and it is taking every last ounce of energy I have to finish it. The characters have no depth - literally and figuratively. There is no plot to speak of. I can see no point to this book. I was left with the impression that it was just a way for the author to articulate for the masses her knowledge of obscure European towns, lexiphanic (highfalutin) vocabulary, and propensity for hyperbole. Don't waste your time or money.

This book is so embarrassingly bad that it seems cruel even to review it. At the same time, I read it almost compulsively in horrified fascination (which is why it deserves one star). Overwritten, vapid, crammed full of cliches, pricey brand names, infelicitous prose, useless Italian phrases dutifully translated (we get that your Italian is good, but so what?), irrelevant literary references (we also get that you went to Harvard and never got over your good luck at being there), it would be best to forget it and its cast of insufferable characters. Still, I devoted some time and money to this silly book, so I'll continue. I understand that this is not, strictly speaking, a memoir, although at times it has the feel of one. Yet I can't help but feel that the author is striving with every sentence, through the character that she has created, to show the world how intelligent, sophisticated, well read, well traveled, beautiful, sexy, successful, and especially how rich, she, the author, is. It's as if she's still trying to prove to all those girls who dissed her back in high school or college that she has become "someone." None of this makes for good or interesting fiction. As a matter of fact, the only interesting aspect of this book is why a black, sort of, woman would want to transform herself into a rich white Italian woman from Torino. It's the twenty-first century. Italy is no longer the ne plus ultra of a chic international life style. It's so last century, as is our fascination with its outdated and superficial social relations and pretensions to nobility. Apparently, however, the publisher still buys into all this nonsense and hopes that we will, too.

I read 'Russian journal' soon after it was published and was thoroughly enarmored both with the content and the style of the book. Having lived in the Soviet Union for many years, I remember being impressed by the ability of the author to understand and convey the nuances of the life and atmosphere in 'mysterious' Russia. I've been watching out for and reading her work ever since. Reading her subsequent books, especially 'Interesting women', a collection of stories, gave me an almost secret pleasure, like I was the only one watching her talent grow and blossom.
So I had no apprehension when I started reading her latest. Good thing I borrowed it from the library. The only reason I bothered to finish it is that I couldn't believe it would not redeem itself, at least somewhat, before it ends. It didn't. It has 'tentative, hopeful screenplay' written all over it. But even if someone does option it, it can't possibly make for an interesting movie. It has completely unoriginal and cardboard characters, no plot to speak of, trite situations and language. Yes, sometimes I did encounter some glimpses of Ms Lee's former style and force of observation. But on the whole the book reads more like another romance novel than a work of a talented writer that Ms Lee undoubtedly is. Huge letdown. Did I say pretentious?
And what's with this comparison, on page 80: '(Nick) Tall with his straight fair hair and a face that everyone in his office tells him looks as American as a baby's behind'?
For more reasons for my dislike of the book - see review by Vaughn A. Carney. A literary 'one-trick pony' seems like an especially apt description.

I'm taken aback by the number of negative reader reviews of this smart, sophisticated novel. Andrea Lee is a superb writer: a wonderful stylist and an astute psychologist. In her focus on the complexities of love and erotic attraction, and particularly on the eros that attaches to wealth and travel, she really is an inheritor of Henry James. Compared to reading her first, autobiographical novella Sarah Phillips and the luminescent stories she publishes in The New Yorker, I will admit that this book was a somewhat trashy pleasure--but that's relative. The major flaw of the book is how little taste we get of what attracts Mira to Zenin, the Italian toy magnate, besides his wealth and power, and how little of their intimacy we're allowed to witness. If this book is as autobiographical as I fear it may be, this may be one reason for the omission. Lee is hard on Mira, which adds to my sense of the novel as possibly an act of atonement. I'm very glad I read it, and I miss it now I've finished it. I want to read everything Lee writes.

The biggest accomplishment that I can say with this book is that I did read it cover to cover. The author has some great descriptive language, but as other reviewers have said, she does not develop her characters well enough. Usually when I read a book, I am engrossed, taking on the character myself. This did not happen with this book. I found myself skimming over some pages and when I tried to go back, I realized I did not miss much.

Mira, a young black Harvard graduate, married, goes to Italy and becomes entangled with Zenin, a wealthy industrialist who is slightly weary of seducing women, but drawn- as might be a peasant king ashamed of a nearly illiterate mother - to Mira's intellect. In elegant contemplative prose, and from the viewpoints of convincing characters, Andrea Lee portrays an Italy - a real Italy - that its residents will recognize all too well.

Numerous movies, plays and works of literature have explored the theme of the "Affair". Andrea Lee, former staff writer and contributor to the New Yorker, offers her version, Lost Hearts in Italy, a work of literary fiction which explores the marriage, affair and the aftermath of a young American woman in Italy over a twenty year period from 1985 -- 2006.

Expatriate Mira Reiver, who is a member of a middle class, mixed-race black family from Philadelphia, flies to Italy to meet her husband, Nick, an up-and-coming financier, the golden boy she met at Harvard, who has accepted a position in Rome. A chance meeting with a billionaire toy manufacturer on the plane becomes the beginning of a crack in the perfect life of the Reivers and thereby changes the course of what should have been a charmed life. Mira, a freelance writer, is a free spirit with a cosmopolitan flair; a black woman who has always lived among, socialized and gone to school with those of the privileged. She, herself has had the best education and the better things in life.

Mira's life sounds like a dream but as fate would have it, with her sense of adventure she cannot resist the charms of Zenin, despite being in love with her husband, therefore setting herself in the middle of a collision course of deception, betrayal and life-altering actions. Race, class and background dictate the eccentricities of the social and psychological dynamics of one's life path and it is no surprise that Mira with all of her arrogance and strong will constantly pushes the envelope. Mira's continual inner war with her racial identity unknowingly translates to Maddie, the couple's daughter, who eventually attends her parents' alma mater and contemplates her place as an American.

The story unfolds from the point of views of not only of Mira, Nick and Zenin, but short vignettes from the people they encounter; a card-reading neighbor, Zenin's best friend, Maddie, the fruit seller, a stewardess on the plane and numerous others. Like actors in a play, these supporting cast members present a prophetic insight into the main characters' actions and psyche. The dichotomy of a marriage is at center stage amidst an international back drop and global sensibilities.

The writing is poetic, rich with metaphoric phrases and startling visual imagery. The author paints a truly picturesque Rome with strokes of romance and culture. This reviewer could see the villages of Turin and feel the draft of an old castle. A Harvard graduate with a MFA in writing, Lee has written the kind of book expected from such a one with an illustrious writing background. But Lee has been accused by critics of writing about the same clichéd characters in her stories; the expatriate ambiguous race woman who is involved with or married to an Italian, as attributed in her short story collection, Interesting Women. As much as I would welcome Lee venturing into new territory, I must admit I am loving her stories that tell of a different kind of black woman, one that is not often seen in literature.

Dera R. Williams
APOOOO BookClub
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