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3.33 AVERAGE
3.33 AVERAGE
Honestly...I started and stopped this book three separate times and I was never fully engaged or interested in the characters. The story moved so slowly for me and they were pretty boring people.
It was just meh...
It was just meh...
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Drug use, Infidelity, Sexual content, Suicide, Toxic relationship, Grief, Stalking, Gaslighting, Alcohol
dark
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
“Although you never know in a marriage who is responsible for what, do you? Husbands and wives collaborate, hiding even from themselves who is calling the shots and who is along for the ride.”
Sircausa is a delicious gem of a novel – a story set in a chaotic Rome and on the island of Siracusa, where place becomes another character. But, despite and in spite of its exotic locale, which adds to the pleasure of this travel novel, this is essentially a story about marriage. About its fragile heart, its deceptions, its comforts and its sometimes dangerous and treacherous outcomes.
Siracusa centres on the lives of two couples, and the story is told from their four viewpoints in alternating chapters. I happen to love the Rashomon-style of narrating in which different versions of the same event are presented by each character. I find it intriguing how we all perceive reality differently, and this novel presents this device faultlessly and smoothly.
Fortysomething New Yorkers, Michael a writer and his wife Lizzie, a freelance journalist travel to Italy with Finn, who is married to Taylor. They have a child, ten-year-old Snow, whose strange name echoes the strangeness of her opaque nature, and who will serve to move events along to a cataclysmic conclusion.
There are undercurrents running through the story – Finn and Lizzie were briefly together in their youth. Taylor is more in love with her child than her husband it appears, and Finn exists on the margin of this too-close and tight relationship between mother and daughter. Taylor is the least likeable at first, with her prissy mannerisms and fear of germs, but somehow, through the telling, you start feeling a sympathy for her.
Rifts are appearing in Lizzie and Michael’s relationship, a fact disclosed to us through Michael’s observations. In Lizzie’s chapters, she is somewhat blissfully unware of these tensions. Lizzie is loveable and likeable, her warmth shines through while Michael’s hesitations and confusions run rampant.
But this is also a travel novel, as such, and the observations around encountering a strange place are pithy and spot-on. Here’s Lizzie on the pressures: “I have to confess, sightseeing makes me feel inadequate. I expect to have an emotional experience— swoon, feel my heart swell, be awed in the face of, in this case, such a monumental architectural achievement. But it never happens.”
And, in a further demonstration of how differently different people experience life, here are three different descriptions of Siracusa.
Lizzie: “The tattered buildings, many with bow-shaped delicate wrought-iron balconies, were cared for in touching ways: a spiky miniature palm in a terra-cotta pot by a door, flower boxes, plastic windmills on sticks— cheery cheap carnival prizes— stuck between balcony spokes or shutter slats. Everything was sweet and innocent, and proof of how small people were before hormones in milk. No earth, no grass, only stone. It made voices echo, bounced the light, gave everything back. Perhaps that was why the few people I passed spoke softly. Perhaps, like me, they were in awe. That this world still existed, inhabited, joyful, seemed miraculous. I fell in love.”
Michael: “Siracusa. Already destabilized, I was further unmoored by the chaos of its narrow streets. A place that refused to adapt to its conquerors, whose ancient footprint still ruled, wasn’t going to bend to my will. Every time I turned a corner I thought I was someplace I’d just been.”
Finn: “Saw Lo Scoglio for the first time. Big fucking boulder. Eerie at night, not so comforting in the day either, but at night it rose up black and prehistoric. A small crowd of revelers teetered over a bridge to get to it. I could barely see a railing. It looked like a miracle, people walking on air. The wind was up, waves crashed against the boulder, throwing up a white spray. The people shrieked and retreated.”
As the story unfolds and the couples travel from Rome to Siracusa, cracks between all of them start appearing, and at times it feels as though each is travelling separately. Pace and tension build, secrets spill out like oil, and as dirty and capable of staining. The read is fast, gripping, almost thriller-like, woven through with observations about marriage that ring astoundingly true. Lizzie, musing on the institution asks: “And why do most of us want marriage? Crave it for status or for stability that is an illusion. Marriage can’t protect you from heartbreak or the random cruelties and unfairnesses life deals out.”
In a conversation with Lizzie, Finn notes that she says, “There are some people who shouldn’t marry. Some people are best single, and pity the ones who marry them. And you know what else? There are some people who dump all their misery into marriage, make wedded bliss their neurotic nest, and the best version of them lives outside that ugly place.”
Siracusa is simply brilliant, thought-provoking, sensuous and angry all the same time. The cataclysmic dénouement throws all these elements up in the air, and will leave you questioning not just the nature of relationships and the compromises we all make in any life, but will make you question these compromises, what we’ll do for those we love, no matter the morality of those actions.
Sircausa is a delicious gem of a novel – a story set in a chaotic Rome and on the island of Siracusa, where place becomes another character. But, despite and in spite of its exotic locale, which adds to the pleasure of this travel novel, this is essentially a story about marriage. About its fragile heart, its deceptions, its comforts and its sometimes dangerous and treacherous outcomes.
Siracusa centres on the lives of two couples, and the story is told from their four viewpoints in alternating chapters. I happen to love the Rashomon-style of narrating in which different versions of the same event are presented by each character. I find it intriguing how we all perceive reality differently, and this novel presents this device faultlessly and smoothly.
Fortysomething New Yorkers, Michael a writer and his wife Lizzie, a freelance journalist travel to Italy with Finn, who is married to Taylor. They have a child, ten-year-old Snow, whose strange name echoes the strangeness of her opaque nature, and who will serve to move events along to a cataclysmic conclusion.
There are undercurrents running through the story – Finn and Lizzie were briefly together in their youth. Taylor is more in love with her child than her husband it appears, and Finn exists on the margin of this too-close and tight relationship between mother and daughter. Taylor is the least likeable at first, with her prissy mannerisms and fear of germs, but somehow, through the telling, you start feeling a sympathy for her.
Rifts are appearing in Lizzie and Michael’s relationship, a fact disclosed to us through Michael’s observations. In Lizzie’s chapters, she is somewhat blissfully unware of these tensions. Lizzie is loveable and likeable, her warmth shines through while Michael’s hesitations and confusions run rampant.
But this is also a travel novel, as such, and the observations around encountering a strange place are pithy and spot-on. Here’s Lizzie on the pressures: “I have to confess, sightseeing makes me feel inadequate. I expect to have an emotional experience— swoon, feel my heart swell, be awed in the face of, in this case, such a monumental architectural achievement. But it never happens.”
And, in a further demonstration of how differently different people experience life, here are three different descriptions of Siracusa.
Lizzie: “The tattered buildings, many with bow-shaped delicate wrought-iron balconies, were cared for in touching ways: a spiky miniature palm in a terra-cotta pot by a door, flower boxes, plastic windmills on sticks— cheery cheap carnival prizes— stuck between balcony spokes or shutter slats. Everything was sweet and innocent, and proof of how small people were before hormones in milk. No earth, no grass, only stone. It made voices echo, bounced the light, gave everything back. Perhaps that was why the few people I passed spoke softly. Perhaps, like me, they were in awe. That this world still existed, inhabited, joyful, seemed miraculous. I fell in love.”
Michael: “Siracusa. Already destabilized, I was further unmoored by the chaos of its narrow streets. A place that refused to adapt to its conquerors, whose ancient footprint still ruled, wasn’t going to bend to my will. Every time I turned a corner I thought I was someplace I’d just been.”
Finn: “Saw Lo Scoglio for the first time. Big fucking boulder. Eerie at night, not so comforting in the day either, but at night it rose up black and prehistoric. A small crowd of revelers teetered over a bridge to get to it. I could barely see a railing. It looked like a miracle, people walking on air. The wind was up, waves crashed against the boulder, throwing up a white spray. The people shrieked and retreated.”
As the story unfolds and the couples travel from Rome to Siracusa, cracks between all of them start appearing, and at times it feels as though each is travelling separately. Pace and tension build, secrets spill out like oil, and as dirty and capable of staining. The read is fast, gripping, almost thriller-like, woven through with observations about marriage that ring astoundingly true. Lizzie, musing on the institution asks: “And why do most of us want marriage? Crave it for status or for stability that is an illusion. Marriage can’t protect you from heartbreak or the random cruelties and unfairnesses life deals out.”
In a conversation with Lizzie, Finn notes that she says, “There are some people who shouldn’t marry. Some people are best single, and pity the ones who marry them. And you know what else? There are some people who dump all their misery into marriage, make wedded bliss their neurotic nest, and the best version of them lives outside that ugly place.”
Siracusa is simply brilliant, thought-provoking, sensuous and angry all the same time. The cataclysmic dénouement throws all these elements up in the air, and will leave you questioning not just the nature of relationships and the compromises we all make in any life, but will make you question these compromises, what we’ll do for those we love, no matter the morality of those actions.
I hated every single character, yet I couldn't put this book down.
3.5
Ending unsatisfactory but liked shift in perspectives
Ending unsatisfactory but liked shift in perspectives
We listened to an audiobook while on a trip. The story is told through four characters so hearing each character in a different voice was perfect. Foreshadowing hints at what is to come, but the mystery plays out nicely. Wonderfully creepy! Hilarious insights into marriage and couples and deceit and self-deceit.