Post by Bozur on Dec 12, 2005 21:03:21 GMT -5
'Falling Palace: A Romance of Naples,' by Dan Hofstadter
In the Shadow of Vesuvius
Review by SHIRLEY HAZZARD
Published: December 11, 2005
The late, and greatly missed, John D'Arms, historian of the ancient world, once remarked that those of us long intimate with Naples give close scrutiny to the writings of our fellow Parthenophiles. This is not, I think, from a proprietary impulse (for who can be possessive toward a city that takes irresistible possession?), but from our seeking, in other votaries, an affinity for that incomparable and indefensible metropolis - the last fragment, as one Italian writer has defined it, "of the ancient world still afloat on the surface of modern times."
Viktor Koen
FALLING PALACE
A Romance of Naples.
By Dan Hofstadter.
247 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
Naples has been marinating on its bay for close to 3,000 years, originally as a grand colony of ancient Greece and subsequently as a center of Roman naval and commercial power, where society enjoyed, in seaside villas, the high culture of a Hellenic past. Naples held its exclusive position through the 18th century, piling up monuments, miracles, misdeeds and music; changing hands among a succession of ruling houses yet nurturing its peculiar genius even through the loss, in the 1860's, of its territories and hegemony in the unification of Italy. For visitors who now enlist in its enduring revelation, Naples becomes uniquely "The City," as Alexandria became for the poet Constantine Cavafy. There will never again be such a vital and varied continuity, such a people, such a congeries of individuality, or such a richly transmitted and subtle apprehension of the human condition. We do not have the context for it, the receptivity, the humility or the time.
There is no shortcut to Naples. Immediate impressions - volcano, islands, architecture, animation - are dramatic. The vibrant beauty of the setting, as Dan Hofstadter says in his beautiful narrative, is itself "full of expectancy," suggesting, like Vesuvius, that there is more to come. But the absorption is private and long. Hofstadter, whose addiction to the city began in adolescence, notes the sense of deliverance that Naples confers, relieving us of the modern litany of explanations and our delusions of control; releasing us into the classlessness of understanding. Naples is a millennial capital of perception and imagination: "a place" - Hofstadter again - "best or perhaps only grasped through myth and memory and half-remembered dream," where dwelling in its vortex "was like having my ear to the seashell of the world." So, also, Gustav Herling, in his "Volcano and Miracle," has written of those who, at Naples, have felt "in touch with some deeply hidden level of the world."
Hofstadter's book - free of knowingness, charged with experience - is written with the ease of affection and discovery. Subtitled "A Romance of Naples," it is a story of love - for an arcane city and for a girl, Benedetta, who embodies the Neapolitan enigma. The city prevails on every page, in its theatricality, singularity and sagacity, familiarity and formality, erudition and street acuity; its logic and its resilience under adversity. Naples has little to say to the fast-forward of modern tourism; but whoever lingers in its long adventure, learns its languages and submits to it as to a teeming work of art, will be changed. Will come to feel, with Goethe at Naples in 1787, "Either you were mad before, or you are mad now."
Hofstadter's title, "Falling Palace," invokes this strange compound of magnificence, energy, intelligence and decay. It touches, also, on the disconcerting tendency of old, elegant Neapolitan buildings to shed their stuccoed facades without warning, as if in realization that their hour has struck. An indefinable tension and slow slithering precede the cloudy avalanche of mortar, marble and pastel stucco in which, it seems, a vital sliver of Naples itself occasionally drops away. Hofstadter connects this, as I do, to pervasively Vesuvian qualities of drama and fatalism in the Neapolitan ethos: "The city was volcanic not only in substance. . . . There was something of brimstone and pumice in the Neapolitan spirit. . . . The people of Naples had had to accept the fact that civilization exists only on geological sufferance." In full view of Nature's generosity, they are mindful of Nature's indifference.
In their many churches, Neapolitans worship a Christian deity. They also keep a propitiatory eye on the gods of their predecessors. Only Naples - bombarded by both sides during World War II - could, and did, provide, in March 1944, the simultaneous fiery spectacle of a city in man-made flames while its volcano flared into eruption, lighting the sky as far as Sicily, as if in primeval disdain for the paltry squabbles of men.
The oddities of Hofstadter's wide range of cronies - utterly remote from the touristic caricature of the Neapolitan as quaint, infantile or exclusively villainous - illustrate the tolerant sociability of the populace: an ambulance driver of elegant speech has "the faceted facial bones of a poet or an aristocrat"; a fashionable photographer enjoys "the good fortune to be amazed at his own surroundings." Well-represented also are the city's "permanently unemployed prodigies," passing their lives "in drafty, high-ceilinged apartments, making the best of chipped china and threadbare linens." Some of these aging savants are steeped in Nietzsche, while others "struggled with Fermat's last theorem or worked on a new translation of Chekhov's plays or a biography of Cimarosa . . . and talked and talked."
Speech here runs a wide gamut from highly cultivated Italian with Neapolitan inflections through basic Italian with intensifying degrees of Neapolitan accent sometimes infused with dialect words; to the dialect itself, rapid and undiluted, a tongue in which, as Hofstadter splendidly puts it, "syllables seem expendable, like the outer leaves of an artichoke." No significant speech is complete without the lively precision of traditional gesture, particularly when the speaker is male. Italian gesture has nothing to do with the "body language" of elsewhere, whose modern flailings often seek to compensate for diminished vocabulary. The gestures of Naples originate in an eloquence that summons every auxiliary in its bravura exercise. Among Hofstadter's friends is a raconteur whose hands "molded the air, kneading it, cutting it like a baker. Drawing a distinction, Gigi gave you two loaves of air, pushed neatly apart with both hands."
The visible Naples of today is underlain for miles by the layered survival of its former selves - the ancient Greek and Roman streets and constructions that, surfacing in outcroppings and excavations, signal the scarcely buried consciousness of millenniums, endorsing the city's propensity for metaphor, memory and dream. Some sections of that vast underground are readily visitable in the central district called Spaccanapoli, which lies along the Greco-Roman axis. Hofstadter, however, has penetrated the extended labyrinth, and his account of his explorations, literally breathtaking, is lyrical in the Neapolitan tradition: "I came to realize that if I'd been able to obtain permission I could have walked most of the way across Naples without surfacing. The netherworld was as labyrinthine as an owl's ear, an endless succession of plutonian chambers, some dank and dripping, others powdery and airless, some black as pitch, others illuminated by clerestories pierced at street level. . . . The multiplicity of hidden cavities boggled the mind."
Engrossing books about Naples, in English, have been rare. Hofstadter's outstanding contribution comes in the wake of Caroline Bruzelius's handsome study of the medieval city, "The Stones of Naples." These celebrations run counter to the painful chronicle of contemporary Neapolitan woes. The city suffers from unemployment, drug traffic, street crime and the outrages of the Camorra, a criminal clan analogous to the Sicilian mafia. A recent issue of the Italian weekly L'Espresso featured a cover story titled "Napoli Addio" - Goodbye, Naples. Naples cannot evaporate. But if its sumptuous palace were to fall at last into degraded obscurity it would carry down with it great beauty, irretrievable testimony and insight; a spectral sympathy with all our human story.
'Shirley Hazzard's novel "The Bay of Noon" is set in Naples. Her most recent novel, "The Great Fire," received a National Book Award in 2003.
In the Shadow of Vesuvius
Review by SHIRLEY HAZZARD
Published: December 11, 2005
The late, and greatly missed, John D'Arms, historian of the ancient world, once remarked that those of us long intimate with Naples give close scrutiny to the writings of our fellow Parthenophiles. This is not, I think, from a proprietary impulse (for who can be possessive toward a city that takes irresistible possession?), but from our seeking, in other votaries, an affinity for that incomparable and indefensible metropolis - the last fragment, as one Italian writer has defined it, "of the ancient world still afloat on the surface of modern times."
Viktor Koen
FALLING PALACE
A Romance of Naples.
By Dan Hofstadter.
247 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
Naples has been marinating on its bay for close to 3,000 years, originally as a grand colony of ancient Greece and subsequently as a center of Roman naval and commercial power, where society enjoyed, in seaside villas, the high culture of a Hellenic past. Naples held its exclusive position through the 18th century, piling up monuments, miracles, misdeeds and music; changing hands among a succession of ruling houses yet nurturing its peculiar genius even through the loss, in the 1860's, of its territories and hegemony in the unification of Italy. For visitors who now enlist in its enduring revelation, Naples becomes uniquely "The City," as Alexandria became for the poet Constantine Cavafy. There will never again be such a vital and varied continuity, such a people, such a congeries of individuality, or such a richly transmitted and subtle apprehension of the human condition. We do not have the context for it, the receptivity, the humility or the time.
There is no shortcut to Naples. Immediate impressions - volcano, islands, architecture, animation - are dramatic. The vibrant beauty of the setting, as Dan Hofstadter says in his beautiful narrative, is itself "full of expectancy," suggesting, like Vesuvius, that there is more to come. But the absorption is private and long. Hofstadter, whose addiction to the city began in adolescence, notes the sense of deliverance that Naples confers, relieving us of the modern litany of explanations and our delusions of control; releasing us into the classlessness of understanding. Naples is a millennial capital of perception and imagination: "a place" - Hofstadter again - "best or perhaps only grasped through myth and memory and half-remembered dream," where dwelling in its vortex "was like having my ear to the seashell of the world." So, also, Gustav Herling, in his "Volcano and Miracle," has written of those who, at Naples, have felt "in touch with some deeply hidden level of the world."
Hofstadter's book - free of knowingness, charged with experience - is written with the ease of affection and discovery. Subtitled "A Romance of Naples," it is a story of love - for an arcane city and for a girl, Benedetta, who embodies the Neapolitan enigma. The city prevails on every page, in its theatricality, singularity and sagacity, familiarity and formality, erudition and street acuity; its logic and its resilience under adversity. Naples has little to say to the fast-forward of modern tourism; but whoever lingers in its long adventure, learns its languages and submits to it as to a teeming work of art, will be changed. Will come to feel, with Goethe at Naples in 1787, "Either you were mad before, or you are mad now."
Hofstadter's title, "Falling Palace," invokes this strange compound of magnificence, energy, intelligence and decay. It touches, also, on the disconcerting tendency of old, elegant Neapolitan buildings to shed their stuccoed facades without warning, as if in realization that their hour has struck. An indefinable tension and slow slithering precede the cloudy avalanche of mortar, marble and pastel stucco in which, it seems, a vital sliver of Naples itself occasionally drops away. Hofstadter connects this, as I do, to pervasively Vesuvian qualities of drama and fatalism in the Neapolitan ethos: "The city was volcanic not only in substance. . . . There was something of brimstone and pumice in the Neapolitan spirit. . . . The people of Naples had had to accept the fact that civilization exists only on geological sufferance." In full view of Nature's generosity, they are mindful of Nature's indifference.
In their many churches, Neapolitans worship a Christian deity. They also keep a propitiatory eye on the gods of their predecessors. Only Naples - bombarded by both sides during World War II - could, and did, provide, in March 1944, the simultaneous fiery spectacle of a city in man-made flames while its volcano flared into eruption, lighting the sky as far as Sicily, as if in primeval disdain for the paltry squabbles of men.
The oddities of Hofstadter's wide range of cronies - utterly remote from the touristic caricature of the Neapolitan as quaint, infantile or exclusively villainous - illustrate the tolerant sociability of the populace: an ambulance driver of elegant speech has "the faceted facial bones of a poet or an aristocrat"; a fashionable photographer enjoys "the good fortune to be amazed at his own surroundings." Well-represented also are the city's "permanently unemployed prodigies," passing their lives "in drafty, high-ceilinged apartments, making the best of chipped china and threadbare linens." Some of these aging savants are steeped in Nietzsche, while others "struggled with Fermat's last theorem or worked on a new translation of Chekhov's plays or a biography of Cimarosa . . . and talked and talked."
Speech here runs a wide gamut from highly cultivated Italian with Neapolitan inflections through basic Italian with intensifying degrees of Neapolitan accent sometimes infused with dialect words; to the dialect itself, rapid and undiluted, a tongue in which, as Hofstadter splendidly puts it, "syllables seem expendable, like the outer leaves of an artichoke." No significant speech is complete without the lively precision of traditional gesture, particularly when the speaker is male. Italian gesture has nothing to do with the "body language" of elsewhere, whose modern flailings often seek to compensate for diminished vocabulary. The gestures of Naples originate in an eloquence that summons every auxiliary in its bravura exercise. Among Hofstadter's friends is a raconteur whose hands "molded the air, kneading it, cutting it like a baker. Drawing a distinction, Gigi gave you two loaves of air, pushed neatly apart with both hands."
The visible Naples of today is underlain for miles by the layered survival of its former selves - the ancient Greek and Roman streets and constructions that, surfacing in outcroppings and excavations, signal the scarcely buried consciousness of millenniums, endorsing the city's propensity for metaphor, memory and dream. Some sections of that vast underground are readily visitable in the central district called Spaccanapoli, which lies along the Greco-Roman axis. Hofstadter, however, has penetrated the extended labyrinth, and his account of his explorations, literally breathtaking, is lyrical in the Neapolitan tradition: "I came to realize that if I'd been able to obtain permission I could have walked most of the way across Naples without surfacing. The netherworld was as labyrinthine as an owl's ear, an endless succession of plutonian chambers, some dank and dripping, others powdery and airless, some black as pitch, others illuminated by clerestories pierced at street level. . . . The multiplicity of hidden cavities boggled the mind."
Engrossing books about Naples, in English, have been rare. Hofstadter's outstanding contribution comes in the wake of Caroline Bruzelius's handsome study of the medieval city, "The Stones of Naples." These celebrations run counter to the painful chronicle of contemporary Neapolitan woes. The city suffers from unemployment, drug traffic, street crime and the outrages of the Camorra, a criminal clan analogous to the Sicilian mafia. A recent issue of the Italian weekly L'Espresso featured a cover story titled "Napoli Addio" - Goodbye, Naples. Naples cannot evaporate. But if its sumptuous palace were to fall at last into degraded obscurity it would carry down with it great beauty, irretrievable testimony and insight; a spectral sympathy with all our human story.
'Shirley Hazzard's novel "The Bay of Noon" is set in Naples. Her most recent novel, "The Great Fire," received a National Book Award in 2003.