In eleven tightly woven chapters that alternate between Renaissance Italy and Tito's Yugoslavia, this novel tells two tales of love, intrigue and betrayal at one and the same time. Here it is
Rimini, 1535, and the Croatian island of Rab, 1948, just days after Tito's momentous break with Stalin. Lives and fates are intertwined, history repeats, nostalgia for home is bittersweet and
undying.
It is the summer of 1995, the war in Bosnia is raging, and the young Bosnian narrator of this story starts out on a tour of an Italian Renaissance castle. He very soon finds himself caught up
in the two tales of passion and intrigue that his Franciscan guide, a refugee like himself, relates. One is the story of Enzo Strecci, a Renaissance poet from Lombardy who has the ill fortune
of falling in love with the wife of Francesco Mardi, his host and protector during a time of Habsburg incursions and espionage. The other is the story of the Franciscan's own ill-fated
passion for the local Communist police commander's daughter during Tito's rupture with Stalinism. Both stories end in tragedy, though one man survives and escapes imprisonment to tell his
tale - to the Bosnian narrator and to us.
The intricate and highly innovative framework - "Chapter One," then "Chapter the First," "Chapter Two," then "Chapter the Second," and so forth - is developed with a lightness of touch that
makes for a surprisingly fast read. The major themes are current and compelling. This is a book partly about refugees, partly about the idiocy of love, and partly about the tragic changes of
fortune that political instability routinely bring down on the unsuspecting. It's a carefully constructed work of contemporary literary fiction that manages to be sexy, sophisticated, brutal,
political, and exciting all at once.
