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April 3, 2008 9:55 AM

BOOK REVIEW: Villa Serena by Domenica de Rosa

Reviewed by Jennie Hughes

This is definitely a novel of two halves. It starts with Emily, a middle-class divorced mother of three children – Siena, Paris and Charlie – in their villa in Tuscany from whence she sends a weekly column about Italian life to an English newspaper.

It’s all quite two-dimensional and predictable. Emily is obsessed by memories of her first boyfriend at University and her lost youth; Siena has an Italian and slightly unsuitable boyfriend; Paris is anorexic; Charlie (a late addition to the family in a desperate attempt to save a doomed marriage) is happy in his Italian nursery school.

So it goes on with descriptions of their life in Italy, some back story about Emily, her ex-husband, her old friend Petra and yadayadayada.  In fact, I nearly gave up on the book after about a couple of chapters because I felt it wasn’t convincing me about any of these people. But I don’t like to abandon books – it seems unkind, somehow – and I’m glad I didn’t.

An archaeologist (Raffaello, a local boy, but he’s been in America for years) starts a dig in the hills just behind Emily’s villa. He’s looking for Etruscan artefacts, but the first things he uncovers are the remains of two village men, partisans in the second world-war. Now we start to get some history of the villagers, and the tensions amongst them. In fact it was while reading the priest’s address at the burial service held for the two men that I suddenly thought, “Hang on, is this a different author?”, because here was a person with an inner life, secrets, depth.

From this point on the book becomes interesting. All sorts of past lives and interactions begin to be disclosed and the characters take on much more reality and roundedness. Old skeletons, both literal and figurative, come back and have to be dealt with. There is war-time intrigue, family feuds, Etruscan finds, sex, food and, just briefly, the possibility of a mad axe attack. The old boyfriend turns out to have psychological problems, Petra starts eating, and Emily ends up with the right man. Yes, the archaeologist, natch.

I guess the difference between the two halves of the book is a deliberate literary device to point up the vacuity of Emily’s life prior to the arrival of Raffaello, but the author is taking a bit of a chance on everyone being as dogged as I am.

Rating: 3/5

Like this? Try: Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Posted by Sarah Painter on April 3, 2008 in British Authors, Rating: 3/5 | Permalink

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