Amazon.co.uk Review
Amanda Prantera's
Don Giovannais a sensible short novel about grand passions not quite happening, about a middle-class comfortable time and place in which delicate social comedy is more likely than grand lust and damnation. Put simply, the novel concerns a middle-aged literary man Henry who develops a crush on his set designer Joanna, a painter much deceived by her promiscuous lawyer husband, whilst producing an amateur version of Mozart's
Don Giovanni for an Umbrian village festival.
Prantera is good on the imperfect understandings that exist between Chiantishire English and their Italian neighbours and partners, and on the emotional compromises of middle age; she also has a developed sense of the energies that go into artistic creation, and the particular pleasures to be found in amateur work even for professionals. This is a novel about opera that carefully sets off clearly differentiated character voices against each other. If at times the author is a little high-flown on the eternal transforming verities of Mozart's music, she is down to earth about messy emotions and mundane complications; she imitates Mozart to the extent of being as interested in the emotionally observant cleaner Amabile, who has problems of her own, as she is in Henry and Joanna. --Roz Kaveney
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Daily Mail
'The perfect novel with which to pass the time on an Italian terrace.'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.