Customer Reviews

In Lucia's Eyes

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In Pasiano, Italy fourteen years old virginal servant Lucia works in a noble house. There she meets seventeen years old just as virginal seminarian student Giacomo Casanova. The youngsters fall in love until she Lucia catches smallpox that scars her face terribly. Unable to face her lover, she runs off Giacomo before fleeing across Europe.

She earns her way doing various jobs especially as a prostitute to those every other fallen woman rejected. Eventually she becomes Madam Galathee de Pompignac running a popular brothel in Amsterdam and using a sexy veil to hide her visage while also making her mysterious to her clients. Casanova, renowned as the seducer le Chevalier de Seingalt, meets his first love and they wager a war of words, wit, and a challenge to determine whose gender is the stronger.

This fascinating historical tale provides a different look at Casanova through the eyes of his first love. Her trials and tribulations turn her into a strong intelligent woman during an era when females were not expected to show any wit. The period is vividly described, though at times the window into the mid eighteenth century overwhelms the battle of the sexes. Still Arthur Japin provides a solid gender war that humanizes the legendary lover as he competes in a fierce skirmish of the mind and the body against his greatest opponent, his first love.

Harriet Klausner

I love stories that steep you in the sounds, the sights even the smells of history. The Girl With the Pearl Earring is a book I adored. But that book now seems a beginner's effort to bring the past to life. Japin writes so believably as an 18th century courtesan, the book is like a found manuscript. The language is period pitch-perfect. And this is that rare book with something for both the mind and the heart. For the mind, a subtle and fascinating meditation on sense versus sensibility (yes, I recommend this to fans of Jane Austen), reason versus feeling. For the heart, there is a irresistibly developed love story, both suspenseful and poignant. You rarely find a contemporary author with these classical skills of story telling. Bravo!

Japin's second novel is a beautiful work of historical fiction. His descriptions of the times, the places, the clothes and fashions and thoughts and activities - perfect. The dialogue, the attitudes, the games his people play - all dead right. Even Japin's weaving together the fictional and nonfictional source material (mostly Casanova's autobiography) is done most skillfully and believably. It is a beautiful work. I enjoyed every page of the book.

I LOVED "In Lucia's Eyes"! I enjoyed it so much that I may immediately re-read it. Segments resonated and clarified universal themes: love, education, cosmetic and internal disfigurement, etc. And, the manner of presentation was intimate, thought-provoking, and timely.

Samples:

"The profound peace I feel in libraries goes beyond silence. The paper doesn't just muffle sound but stills the roar of my thoughts... [and] things written down are easier to let go of."

"The attraction of ruins is one whose explanation I shall expect in the hereafter! What allure could there be about a heap of rubble?"


The Author's birth year (1956) and nationality (Holland) are significant in that the book takes place mostly in Amsterdam and much has changed, while other things have not... in 250 years!

For me, the book's locale/subject had some meaning: I visited Amsterdam when I was about 20. At that time, "a must" tourist attraction was to view whores who were displayed in street-level windows. With only three days to see the sights, I went. Then, I was too young; but now, because of this book, I know more.

With Lucia, in the 1750's, we listen to her step-by-step analysis of her life. She describes her peasant frivolities, her loving parents, how she comes to be educated, what friendships and employers augment her growth, and we mature with her.

She details her love, explains the milieu of the social classes, the medical profession, and Amsterdam's bizarre attitude toward prostitution. And ultimately... Well, I was surprised with the ending, comfortable as it was. The developments are both enjoyable and eye-opening.

In "In Lucia's Eyes", theatrics, ancestry, and cosmetics (or veils) are treated in more ways than one. The reader learns in the Author's Postscript (Arthur Japin, author, actor) that the BACKGROUND of an anecdote, a play the characters attend, exists. Jacques Japin (ancestor of the author?) wrote the play within, in 1747. We also learn that Lucia may actually be "buried in a churchyard of St. Paul's in Flatbush, New York". Even the typeface of the book is documented as having significant timeliness. Therefore, the depth is both playful and serious.

Okay, so the book feels real and the details hit resonating chords. But more importantly, the theme is: "The blessing of love is not in being loved, it IS in loving." We, the reader, are shown the evolution of learning to accept oneself. Further, "We MUST give away the thing we most long for." And, writing DOES liberate. I agree.

I gave this book a four-star rating (less than a perfect five), because there were a few transitions that were not as crystal clear as they might have been. Those wrinkles were momentary hiccups and that's all. Perhaps when I re-read the book, I'll blame the continuity snags on my own alertness when reading.

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it. Lucia had a happy childhood. She searched for betterment. She used admirable good ethics, survival tactics, and cleverness and she tenderly orchestrated the life she was dealt.

Thus, "In Lucia's Eyes" by Arthur Japin, translated by David Colmer, a journey ascends and enriches the reader. Read it and see for yourself.

I know now there is no one out there delivering like Amazon...

Lucia is a 14 year old peasant girl who meets and falls in love with Casanova when he visits the home of her family's employer. He must return to Venice, but he vows to return in the spring so that they can wed. Lucia's family employer essentially sponsors a tutor for her to learn how to go from peasant to cultured Venetian lady (a la Eliza Doolittle). But on the eve of her debut & wedding she is stricken with small pox and incurs deforming scars on her face - a death knoll for success in Venetian society for her and anyone associated with her. Thus, Lucia has her mother tell him she ran off with someone else, and Lucia runs away from her home so that he will not find her. The two meet again much later in life, both under assumed names, and she realizes that her breaking of his heart is the reason he disdains any emotional relationship with the 1000's of women he has seduced since.

Sounds like the set up for a great story... but what follows is anything but. The book reads like an insecure person's attempt to prove themselves the most evolved, rational, and learned philosopher in a room full of other pompous, insecure pseudo-philosophers. The tone was a turn off. An entire section of the book, Lucia's recounting of her friendship with a French woman who takes her in and attempts to continue the expansion of Lucia's mind and philosophizing abilities, is boring drivel.

Lucia tells the reader of her life in prostitution in a completely detached voice. She casually mentions being violated in all ways, having no choice, and having "stooped" to the lowest levels. However, she lost to alcohol, opium or some other drug to numb the experience though chemicals are nearly ubiquitously relied on by women in prostitution to numb out their harsh realities. Japin presents Lucia as suffering none of the shame or embarrassment so commonly felt by the millions of women who live similar experiences, despite her extremely sheltered and virtuous upbringing. He omits all possible detrimental outcomes which result from years of being used in prostitution, despite that in real life such an experience literally "uses up" the person (my comments based on my professional knowledge from working with survivors). I just couldn't read this sterile presentation of this young woman's tragic life (deformation, shunning, loss of love & family, and being used in prostitution) and be able to see Lucia as real in any sense at all.

This was all so distracting and unrealistic to me, I simply can't recommend this book.

I really hate to not finish a book, no matter how much I dislike the book in question. But this novel, which seemed so promising according to the other reviews, was just not readable.

I liked the premise, Casanova's only lost love turns out to have run away in shame after being disfigured by smallpox, and later they meet and engage in a battle of the genders when she is a prostitute in Amsterdam.

But this book does not read like historical fiction. Possibly it is the translation from Dutch into English which rendered this into a snooty sudo intellectual novel on the nature of suffering. Maybe it is the translation which made all of the words in this book into things rarely seen in dictionaries. I mean, normal English isn't exactly a bad language for describing things. Sometimes a kiss is just a kiss, a smile is just a smile....not "any mouth game we could make of it" or something weird like that.

Anyway, the language of this book killed me. I lost interest by page 100, and I quite without finishing.

Two stars.