Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Love The Book of Love!, 2 Jul 2008
I love historical novels, particularly those where the history blends seamlessly with a cracking good story. With her secure knowledge of and intelligent take on Medieval Italian politics and her innate ability to create compelling and convincing characters, Sarah Bower has again woven a rich tapestry in her second novel. It is indeed a book of love in all its guises. More than one love story unfolds as the pages turn and love, as well as blind, can be twisted and crippled.
Although Esther may not appear as immediately empathetic a character as Gytha in Sarah's debut novel, The Needle in the Blood - there were times I wanted to scream at her for mooning over of one of history's nastier creations - you gain a deep understanding of her total powerlessness and alienation from the world in which she finds herself through no fault of her own.
The Book of Love is a richly satisfying historical novel. It deserves prizes. But there is one award Sarah Bower will never ever win and that is the Bad Sex Award that awaits those hapless novelists whose descriptions of the sex-act are either pornographic or toe-curlingly naff. Her love scenes are charged with the most delicious eroticism! But she is also heart-wrenchingly tender and surely no-one could fail to weep for the pain Esther endures as she learns the hard way where your dreams can lead you.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Supremely satisfying, 19 Dec 2008
Set in the late C15th in Renaissance Italy, this tells the story of Esther, a converted Jew, in the service of Lucrezia Borgia. Historical novels tend, in my view, to fall into the political action novel or the lush romance, but Bower treads a careful line between the two. Drawn into the emotional and political machinations of the Borgias and D'Este families Esther (renamed Violante) is always the innocent, always somehow external, and always knowing and understanding less than we do.
Bower creates rounded characters who nod to their historical myths but yet take on a life of their own. To her credit, no-one is perfect or unflawed. It probably helps if you have at least a vague sense of the history of Renaissance Italy at this period, but that shouldn't put you off if you don't.
I'm not a great fan of the first person narrative which tends to involve all kinds of clumsy authorial manipulations (narrators having to explain how beautiful they are, often through the cliché of looking in a mirror; long narratives explaining how they know things they can't possibly witness for themselves) but Bower negotiates this better than a lot of authors. Esther/Violante at times is an irritating person through whom to see the world, but not outstandingly so.
However the central heart of the book, and where Bower does a superb job, is the recreation of Cesare Borgia. Brilliant, ruthless, enigmatic, the book really comes alive when he is present. And the fact that he is absent for so much of it places the reader in the same yearning relationship to him as Violante. But he never descends to being a romantic hero, and even his charm is somehow cold and deliberate. Many historical novelists would have softened Cesare and so destroyed the tension of the book but to Bower's credit she never does. The central `twist' of the book may depend on how much you know about the Borgias, but whether you know it, or simply intuit it from the narrative, this adds to the tension rather than dissipating it.
So overall this is a classy and superior historical that it intelligently written. Some of the political background gets (inevitably) a bit vague and undifferentiated, but that is compensated for by a supremely satisfying read.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Book of Love - Love the Book, 31 Jul 2008
When I read Sarah Bower's Needle in the Blood last year I felt then, and still do, that it was one of the best historical novels I had read since Kathryn by Anya Seton which every woman of my age, in the UK anyway, seemed to have read when they were 15 and were totally overcome by. (This has got to be one of the worst constructed sentences ever, but never mind...). I tend to judge all other historical novels by the Katherine yardstick and Needle certainly measured up (sorry about the sewing pun, totally unintentional). When I started her second novel, The Book of Love, I was a little worried. Would it be as good? Would I like it? Had I perhaps gone over the top with my Needle ravings?
Well, the answers to these questions are Yes, Yes and No.
Had saved BOL for a weekend when I knew I would have plenty of time to sit down and immerse myself in the story and spend two days in the world of the Borgias and 15th century Italy. I will admit to being biased in my crush on Cesare Borgia as I first fell in love with him when I read the three Jean Plaidy books devoted to this family back in my long lost teenage years and this fascination has never totally left me.
OK so where to begin? The narrator of the story is La Violante, a Jewess converted to the Christian faith, who becomes a lady in waiting to Lucrezia Borgia. Her birth name is Esther Sarfarti and she and her family were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragon (this scenario was the background for another stupendous historical saga The Cathedral by the Sea, reviewed by me last month). Esther's father was banker to the Borgias and it was he who urged her to convert to Christianity and leave her family in order to secure her future.
If you ask most people what they know about the Borgias the most common reaction is "Ah, yes didn't they hold dinner parties and poison all the guests?" Films have been made about them, an ill fated TV series (who can ever forget Adolfo Cieli on the BBC some 25 years ago, excruciatingly bad) and an opera by Donizetti. This is one of those historical myths which have grown up over the years, entrenched in fact by constant repetition. The Borgias were not exactly the kind of family you would like to have living next door, but not quite as bad as we are led to believe. Judging their behaviour by modern day standards is a pointless exercise. If we lived in a country where each state fought for supremacy and power as Italy did at this time and we had to live by our wits and talents and resort to stratagems which seem unacceptable, merely to stay alive and keep our head on our shoulders, we would view life differently.
As the story unfolds La Violante, Esther's given nickname, accompanies her mistress to Ferrara where Lucrezia has secured an advantageous marriage to Alfonso D'este, Duke of Ferrara (pictured right). Before the departure from Rome, La Violante has met Cesare:
"I knew in less than the space of a breath, his face was the prism though which I would see the whole world from now on, the yardstick by which I would measure the beauty of every face. And that he understood my feelings, and that for this moment, if for no other, his beauty was a gift reserved only for me".
Fascinating, promiscuous, cruel, brave, dashing and endowed with a powerful sexual aura, totally irresistible, she is overwhelmed by a lifelong passion for him, bearing a son who is taken away from her in a brutal betrayal which breaks her heart.
When reviewing a book such as this, I try to avoid cliches but it is difficult 'teeming and pulsating with life', 'a sprawling canvas', these phrases fit the bill beautifully and I set them down here knowing just how hackneyed they are. Reading the Book of Love is like looking at every painting of Renaissance Italy you have ever seen. Scenes pass across the inner eye, full of dazzling colour, warmth and vitality. The political infighting, the jockeying for power, the panic when the Pope, Alexander Borgia dies, and the rush to secure the family's position; the clothes, silks, satins, gold thread; the jewels, diamonds, emeralds, pearls and rubies; golden Venetian masks studded with precious gems; the perfumes, jasmine, rose, orange; the poetry of the Italian language, even the names of the states roll off the tongue - Mantua, Padua, Ferrara, Urbino. Then the contrast of the squalor and the filth of the peasants and their lives, the cruelty of the treatment of the Jews who live from day to day never sure of their place or their security but still clinging to their religious customs in the face of adversity.
"I knew these people, they were the same people I had shared the festivals with as a child...the older girls and their mothers would exchange their modest, even drab clothes for striped silks and slashed velvets and head scarves tinkling with gold coins. Tableware of wood and horn would be replaced with silver and glass, and there would be dishes coloured with saffron and turmeric, fragrant with cinnamon and nutmeg and the distillation of orange flowers"
I am not going to tell you anything about the story as I want everyone to read this book for themselves with no clues from me as to its ultimate outcome. Suffice it to say that La Violante's life, so closely entwined with that of the Borgias is full of love and heartbreak and despair with a shattering discovery in the final chapters which left me with mouth agape as she learned the truth of the intrigue and deceit practiced upon her by Lucrezia and the family to whom she has given her love and loyalty. Nearly 500 pages of riveting reading and I shut the book up with a huge sigh and deep regret when I came to the end of Esther's story.
Glittering, gorgeous, compelling and stunning, Sarah Bower has done it again.
Can't wait for the next one.........
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