Stone Virgin [Hardcover]

Barry Unsworth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1986

In its romantic and dangerous tour of history, Barry Unsworth's Stone Virgin rivals A. S. Byatt's Possession.

A mysterious sculpture of a beautiful and erotic Madonna holds the key to the Fornarini family's secrets. When Raikes, a conservation expert, tries to restore her, he is swept under the statue's spell and swept under the spell of the seductive Chiara Litsov, a member of the Fornarini family now married to a famous sculptor. Raikes finds himself losing all moral grounding as his love for statue and woman intertwine in lust and murder.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

She is the Madonna of the Annunciation, carved in Venice 540 years ago and now encrusted by an acid rain that rots the stone. Simon, an English sculptor who has turned to art restoration, labors ardently to save the statue's beauty. The stone is strangely luminous; the Virgin's gestures are ambiguous and provocative. Infatuated with the statue, Simon hallucinates about its past, glimpsing scenes of betrayal, murder and lust. Variations are replayed on these ancient passions as centuries blend into one another: Simon loves Chiara, whose body has been celebrated in bronze sculpture by her husband, Litsov, while the predatory art dealer Lattimer lurks ominously. British novelist Unsworth (Mooncranker's Gift provides knowledgable discourses on art, breathtaking scenes of Venice and a ripe plot that manages to link Renaissance glory to 18th century profligacy and contemporary intrigue.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Simon Raikes is given the task of restor ing a 15th-century sculpture of the Ma donna on a church in Venice. A frustrat ed artist himself, Simon is compelled to solve certain mysteries: Who was the sculptor? Why was the work sup pressed for two centuries? How did it earn consecration? As he begins to painstakingly shear away corrosion, the statue apparently confronts him with vi sions and stirs his passions. His search for answers leads to a local sculptor's wife, with whom Simon falls in love, and eventually to a new mystery. The author handles a variety of narrative voices and the aura of suspense well. By disclosing the lives of those involved with this Madonna at three significant historical times, Unsworth allows sub tle examination into the underlying theme, the attitudes men have toward women. Andrew Peters, Pioneer Multi-Cty. Lib., Norman, Okla.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 309 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (T); First US edition. edition (February 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395354129
• ISBN-13: 978-0395354124
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,024,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read it and find yourself intrigued!, August 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Stone Virgin (Paperback)

The opening of the book with the unknown accused is fantastic, one cannot help to continue reading. As the book unravels fragmenst and anecdotes of the history of the Virgin, it is woven in with the current work of the resoterer in an intricate way, that leaves you no room to put the book down. Read it and give youself a good dosage of history, mystery and sensualism.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The unlimited images of poetry revealed in exceptional prose, September 26, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Stone Virgin (Paperback)

Have you ever been drawn to an icon? An image so beautiful that it haunts you and never really leaves your senses? So goes the story in "Stone Virgin." Personally, I am a willing victim of just such a vision, and I have found in this vivid rendering another's soul also captivated by an inexplicable love of image, and vexed by limitless longing. There is no love greater than that in our imagination, that which we can only dream about. Reality has a hard time measuring up to our ideals. As a result, there is room for fantasy and secret desires of a near-sacred quality in all of our lives, those wisps of knowing-yet-not-knowing that drive our abilities to seek what is seldom found. Touching it, if even briefly, renews the quest to have it completely. "Stone Virgin" facilitates the journey by offering a sometimes-tortured, but always mystical entry into a journey that seeks beauty and completeness. If you are not deeply moved by this tale, you have not yet begun your own journey.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Venice preserved . . . but not brought to life, December 29, 2005

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stone Virgin (Paperback)

A disappointment after Unsworth's SACRED HUNGER. A British restorer works on an early quattrocento Madonna on a Venetian church. In doing so, he becomes psychically complicit in the unknown sculptor's passion for his original model, and eventually physically involved with the model (and wife) of a contemporary sculptor who is later found dead. The three parallel stories dealing with the various periods (1432, 1793, and 1972) interleave but do not truly interlock. Fortunately, more time is spent on the modern story than the two earlier ones, which are told in an epistolary style that never catches fire. Unsworth's descriptions of Venice and its lagoon nicely catch its character, especially in the less visited areas, and his unfolding of the art-historical mystery is not without interest. But the people in the book seem created to animate their setting as in a Canaletto canvas, rather than leading independent lives on their own.

There are other novels which weave a fiction around real or imagined works of art, such as Tracy Chevalier's GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING and Iain Pears' THE RAPHAEL AFFAIR. Both these authors also wrote books set in multiple historical periods: Chevalier's THE VIRGIN BLUE and Pears' masterpiece THE DREAM OF SCIPIO. All of these belong to the 1990s. Published in 1986, Unsworth's book seems a comparatively early example of such trends in what one might call the quasi-erudite popular novel. Though not challenging either Chevalier or Pears at their best, THE STONE VIRGIN easily eclipses most other derivatives of the genre, such as Dan Brown's dreadful THE DA VINCI CODE or the entire oeuvre of Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Finally, a quibble. I suppose it was inevitable that Norton should have put a sculpture on the paperback cover, but I believe that the one they chose is a couple of centuries too late to be the one in the book!