Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome [Paperback]

Leonard Barkan (Author), Nick Barberio (Photographer)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2008

Part memoir, part literary criticism, part culinary and aesthetic travelogue, this loving reflection is a poignant, funny narrative about an American professor spending a year in Rome. A scarred veteran of academic culture wars retreating to a cradle of culture, Barkan is at first hungry, lonely, and uncertain of his intellectual mission. But soon he is appointed unofficial mascot of an eccentric community of gastronomes, becomes virtually bilingual, and falls in love. As the year progresses, he finds his voice as a writer, loses his lover, and definitively returns to America with heart, mind, and body. His memoir is the celebration of a life lived in the uncanny spaces where art and real people intersect.

Barkan’s reminiscence is not just about the Renaissance and ancient statuary, or Shakespeare and Mozart, Charles Bukowski and Paul de Man, eggplant antipasto and Brunello di Montalcino, foot fetishism and sulfur baths. At the heart of the narrative—beneath that beguiling surface of irony, humor, and misdirection—is a man of genuine ardor, struggling with what it means to be a homosexual and a Jew, trying to rediscover or reinvent his own intellectual passions. Hilarious, erudite, and lusciously rendered, Satyr Square gives us the whole of a life made up from fragments of Italy, art, food, and longing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Barkan, a Princeton professor of comparative literature, spent a year in Rome working on a book on the Roman Renaissance practice of exhuming ancient sculpture (Unearthing the Past). In true academic manner, Barkan recounts his year through critiques of the art and society surrounding him, from the contemporary literature that graced the bookshelf in his fifth-floor apartment and the recording of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni that was his first serious introduction to the Italian language, to the buildings along his daily jaunts. As Barkan reads into Rome, Rome "reads" him and the same art that he studies acts as a key to uncover his own layers of self. In a simplistic example, Barkan's study of the eternal fascination with Spinaro, a bronze sculpture of a youth continually represented in Roman art, illuminates his own attraction to an equally striking young man. This weighty read feels like a multicourse meal served too quickly; one is left feeling overfull from not being able to savor one course before the subsequent one arrives. Yet Barkan's critical prowess is enviable, and the overarching theme of art's universal and everlasting power to represent life is satisfying to anyone dedicated to art or its study. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Princeton professor Barkan chronicles a year spent in Rome and paints a city of manic simultaneity. Traffic zooms around centuries of culture, and so Barkan's polyglot narrative bustles about his story. References from Shakespeare to Bukowski, Mozart to Montaigne, pepper his discovery of the city's corners to expose, to himself and to us, the secrets of his spirit. His is a year of food and wine, love and longing, and its poignancy is ripe. Barkan's prose is as dense as his city's ancient stone walls and as bright as the tawny afternoon light that illuminates them. Like vines heavy with grapes, sentences droop under the weight of their words, yet the arc of his story is resilient. Barkan displays such an inspiring affinity to his surroundings that one wonders if the man captured the city or if the city captured the man. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. We have but to gaze on the sparkling threads of his teeming tapestry, united by an ardent, personal voice, and drink in its vulnerable glory. Thomas Barthelmess
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 290 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press; 1 edition (June 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810124947
• ISBN-13: 978-0810124943
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,483,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and N.Y.U. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale, 1986) and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999), which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Pen American Center, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy on the subject of food and wine. He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk. Northwestern, 2008), which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself; and he has completed Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, the first wide-ranging study of the artist's habit of writing words on his drawings, which will be published by Princeton University Press in 2010.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An American academic spends an epicurean year in Rome, February 24, 2007

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A reader from Boston, MA (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome (Hardcover)

Esthete, epicure, oenophile, academic, and Jewish and gay. Place in the Eternal City for a year and observe the interesting results. This memoir of the sabbatical year of a modest but multifaceted man in Rome is not, one would have to say, an exciting read. For a wild ride, see Felice Picano's Men Who Loved Me. Here is a book for those who appreciate the quieter pleasures: Renaissance sculpture, Roman history, wine, good food, and opera -- at least Mozart's Don Giovanni to which the author refers frequently. As blessedly free of the effete as any book of its type could possibly be, author Barkan describes his eventful Roman year, one with gastronomic and vinous indulgence at its core. We meet his very peculiarly Roman set of new friends, who are of a type that inhabit a very different world and in fact are a very different species than one would encounter in North America. Full of engaging digressions on a myriad of subjects, this book keeps the interest of those with a bent for food and wine, art and music. A glossary for the monolingual would have been nice. A map of Rome with locations noted is unfortunately missing.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars WAY Over the Top, December 14, 2009

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A reader (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome (Paperback)

Argh, how to describe this weirdly-seasoned stew of a book? The author comes across as an over-intellectualized, neurotic, guiltily homosexual, prodigiously conceited, agonizingly self-conscious, precious academic snob--one of those inadvertent self-parodies that abound among the faculties of Ivy League universities.

Rome through his eyes seems to consist entirely of married men who, given their druthers, would really all be gay as daisies. But alas, they've made their choice to marry and all they can do is play frustrating little semi-sexual games with poor Barkan, most of them consisting of elaborate rituals involving food and wine. Are we supposed to feel sorry for the author because he's too neurotic to find himself an openly gay partner and have an affair? But that would be way too simple. Barkan would rather wallow in his self-absorbed and self-created complexities.

The most interesting part of this book consists of Barkan's struggles with the subtleties of the Italian language. But even here, the author's monumental conceit keeps getting in the way; he can't resist bragging to the reader over and over again about his mastery of so many languages and his considerable skills in Italian. He's not over-estimating those skills--his translations of some of the really raunchy "pasquinades" of the Renaissance are extremely clever.

If the book weren't set in Rome, I'd never have been able to finish it. But, in the moments when Barkan drops his obsession with handsome men, expensive wine, and gourmet food, it was fun to see familiar fragments of the Eternal City through (very!) different eyes.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars buon vino, buona cucina, buona letteratura, buon sesso, July 8, 2007

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JuJu (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome (Hardcover)

This book is so intelligent and yet so pleasurable, or perhaps I should say so pleasurable and so intelligent, it makes me wish Barkin had more lives and had written memoirs about them all. His writing is perfectly pitched. We get not just the funny, rich, sensuous experiences of encounters with strangers and new wines and new language, but also the other things we all live through, crushes, and loneliness, and embarrassment, related with both unusual honesty and unusual humor. I think its a book for anyone, but if you've ever had a glass of wine that was a complete revelation, or listened over and over to Don Giovanni, or wandered through Rome alone, you really must spend some time in Barkan's wonderful company.