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Cargando... The Last Supper: A Summer in Italypor Rachel Cusk
Books Read in 2015 (2,967) Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Esta reseña ha sido escrita por los Primeros Reseñadores de LibraryThing. 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.
She certainly resents her fellow tourists. Her snobbery in this respect is impressively flexible: in Sansepolcro she sees tourists “of a superior kind” — although they’re art lovers, like herself, she mocks their bourgeois rectitude. In Florence the “herds” repulse her. In Assisi she’s “outraged” by the pilgrims who wait in line to pay reverence to the relics of St. Francis but ignore the frescoes of Giotto. At least she has the courage of her convictions: she makes no attempt to conceal her disdain.
When Rachel Cusk decides to travel to Italy for a summer with her husband and two young children, she has no idea of the trials and wonders that lie in store. Their journey leads them to both the expected and the surprising, all seen through Cusk's sharp and humane perspective. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Having read Cusk before, I had expectations of insights into ground I thought I knew quite well. At first, I was not disappointed. Her wry insights into the pages of Contatti and observations of the characters she encounters on her travels were a delight. But then, a veil descends and she (and her family) vanish from sight. We are not given much of a glimpse of her husband or her children. The veil is not really lifted until the last pages of the book. Ultimately, there is a kind of profoundly English drabness that makes the veil a kind of smog. It seems to keep Cusk from sharing her intelligence beyond the superficial descriptions of place and people (which she does well and with economy) but there is and was so much more to explore that, by the end, I felt cheated by the limitations and constraints of this resolute Englishness. In a curious way the selection of photographs mirror the text. Their resolution not quite enough to be fully readable, some obscure, many superfluous.
This is not to say there were not moments in the Last Supper that make it worth reading. The enchantment of their stay in the Ardèche with Bertrand lingers. There is a vitality surrounding the tennis matches with Jim and Amanda that makes me feel as if I was present. Cusk lightly touches on the way time expands and contracts, on being together as a family, on the way children can bond instantly, on not being a tourist but not quite belonging, on not finding a place to stay the night, on the forces of disorder in Naples, on being Italian, but she just touches, she doesn't fully embrace anything except her standoffishness and the inevitability of returning to her fold. I think her writing works best when she is present and visible; not hiding behind a veil of descriptive commentary. ( )