Secrecy - Softcover

Rupert Thomson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847084826 ISBN 13: 9781847084828

Publisher: Granta Books, 2014

Synopsis

Zummo - a 17th-century prodigy and creator of figures so realistic they look as though they might draw breath - has spent his life fleeing his past. Summoned to the Medici court by the Grand Duke, a man of holy devotions and hidden longings, Zummo finds himself in a city riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions, where adulterers are publicly flogged, while within the palace walls members of the court indulge their nefarious pleasures. Commissioned by the Grand Duke to sculpt a life-size Venus from wax, Zummo scours the streets for inspiration. But 1690s Florence is a place of unforseen dangers and secrets still more devastating than his own, and when a young woman's body is found on the banks of the Arno, Zummo suspects that the source of vice has its bed in the Medici court. As he proceeds with his creation, he begins to wonder whether this perfect woman will be his salvation or his downfall. Set in a Florence blighted by corruption and austerity, Secrecy is a tour de force of whispered pleasures and startling revelations. It is a scintillating, breathtaking read from a novelist at the height of his powers.

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2014: “He came on a November day, a cold wind blowing, the fields soaked with rain.” With that opening line we’re introduced to Zummo, the mysterious Sicilian sculptor whose specialty is dioramas of death: wax figures of dead and dying plague victims, with rats tugging at their entrails. “I’m interested in corruption and decay,” he explains. Set in Florence, in the late 1600s, Zummo is commissioned by the Grand Duke to create a wax sculpture of a woman to replace his wife, the Duchess (who hates her husband and has fled the royal manor). British writer Rupert Thomson’s characters are fantastically comical or creepy or weird: an imperious nobleman who rolls “syllables on his tongue like pieces of soft fruit”; a menacing black-robed priest (“slippery, reptilian”); a beautiful apothecary girl of suspicious lineage; a gossipy house boy with a missing ear named, of course, Earhole. Packed with enough lies, betrayals, jealousies, couplings, and secrets to rival, say, Congress, this is a rich and delicious book that reads more like a brainy mystery than “historical.” That’s not a dig at the historical bits. The recreation of life on the dangerous streets of Renaissance Florence is masterful. Says the sculptor (again, a line that could apply to Congress): “I’d never lived in a place where paranoia was so completely justifiable.” Maybe I’m easy to please, or I’m a sucker for micro-scenes like the royal librarian who walks away from a Jesuit scholar and a few monks, mutters “nest of vipers” and chomps into a hard-boiled egg. I’m also a sucker for Thomson’s language: palace floors are “voluptuous with dust,” an old woman smells of “famine breath,” a man’s privates are referred to as “Your root. Your yard. Your pego.” Famine in the countryside, an earthquake, love and death and disturbing works of art... I loved it all. --Neal Thompson

About the Author

RUPERT THOMSON is the author of eight highly acclaimed novels: Dreams of Leaving, The Five Gates of Hell, Air and Fire, The Insult (one of David Bowie's 100 Favourite Reads), Soft, The Book of Revelation, Divided Kingdom and most recently, Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award and by World Book Day for the Book to Talk About 2008. His memoir, This Party's Got to Stop, also published by Granta, won him the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Award. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

Edition details

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847084826
• ISBN 13: 9781847084828
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320