The Uncle from Rome - Hardcover

Caldwell, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670840580 ISBN 13: 9780670840588

Publisher: Viking, 1992

Synopsis

Michael Ruane, an American opera singer who finds fame eluding him in America, begins his life anew in Naples, where he finds life in the streets more vibrant and melodramatic than a staged opera

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Reviews

Michael Ruane, an undistinguished opera singer from Indiana, has come to Naples to play a minor role in an important production of Tosca and an important role in a minor production of Curlew River . As this shrewd and splendid novel begins, the diva starring in Tosca asks Michael to play yet a third role. It is, she tells him, an old Neapolitan custom to pay a distinguished-looking man to attend family functions and pose as the "uncle from Rome," his presence suggesting the host's prestige and social standing, and she wants Michael to appear at the wedding of local friends in the guise of the groom's uncle. Michael agrees, entangling himself in a complex drama that rivals the two operas in its passion and surpasses them in its capacity for perpetual surprise. Caldwell ( Under the Dog Star ) balances the theatrics of his plot with an understated narration, and weights his themes--the interplay of life and art--with careful, colorful observations. (Of laundry hung out to dry, for example, he writes: "The bold emblems or the tattered banners sent out their jubilant or melancholy news, and one could tell at a glance who was favored and who was scorned by the local gods.") The finale is nothing short of extraordinary.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An emotionally numb American tenor, good enough only for opera's secondary roles, finds the grief he seeks over his male lover's death by entangling himself in the lives of overwrought Neapolitans. Like Caldwell's last two novels (Under the Dog Star, 1987, The Deer at the River, 1984), this book doesn't jell. Worse yet, the characters do not behave like recognizable human beings. Even the motives of the protagonist, Michael Ruane, are unclear despite his frequent interior monologues. Ruane arrives in Naples to sing the role of Spoletta in Tosca at San Carlo, and the role of the Madwoman in Benjamin Britten's Curlew River, a one-act opera that Ruane has translated into Italian and also directs. A request from a diva he can't refuse adds another role, but this one's offstage: ``the uncle from Rome,'' a fictitious character Neapolitans engage to lend status to weddings, Rome being the center of power. This embroils Ruane in the real-life affairs of the family of the groom, who raped the bride so she would have to marry him, according to local mores, instead of his brother. This dysfunctional family behaves with an absurdity that wouldn't be acceptable even in grand opera, where the music supplies at least some credence to the plot. Ruane further complicates his life by his attentions to a transvestite prostitute who is dying of AIDS, the disease that killed Ruane's lover back in New York. The story takes on its only conviction in a flashback to Ruane's desertion by his lover, who died without giving Ruane a chance to ease his final days, leaving Ruane bereft but with a torpid heart. Overheated yet strangely cold doings in present-day Naples with a sexually confused hero blundering among preposterous people. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Michael Ruana is in Naples to direct and star in Curlew River and to sing the compirmario part in Tosca . His third role, which he agrees to take on as a favor to his leading lady, is to pretend to be the "uncle from Rome" at a local wedding. According to tradition, the attendance of the uncle from Rome lends prestige to the family and the occasion. Michael cannot seem to escape his role after the wedding, instead finding himself drawn into the grand opera of life in Naples. He is released only after the tragic death of one of his "nephews," a release that is cathartic and allows him to escape his detachment from himself. The story is rich with detail and layered with operatic highs and lows. It is everything opera should be in novel form.
- Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Connecticut at Torrington Lib.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670840580
• ISBN 13: 9780670840588
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304