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The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy

Name: The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy
Author: Rachel Cusk
ISBN: 9780312429652

by Rachel Cusk

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Overview

Casting off a northern winter and an orderly life, a family decides to sell everything and go to Italy—to search for art and its meanings, for freedom from routine, for a different path into the future. Their three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, the Piero della Francesca trail and the tourist furnaces of Amalfi, the simple glories of pasta and gelato. Through the lens of Italian culture, landscape, and cuisine, Rachel Cusk reconsiders our impulses toward indulgence and escape, inspiration and succor, creativity and domestic life.

Synopsis

A memoir set in Italy, from the author of THE COUNTRY LIFE and ARLINGTON PARK, about one woman's conflict between the intense, solitary pleasures of art and the rigors of commitment to a family.

The Barnes & Noble Review

It takes a certain courage (or recklessness or hubris) to write about being a foreigner in Italy, to choose that often-traveled road so littered with cliché. But in her smart and original memoir, British novelist Rachel Cusk explores the land of gelato and olive trees -- joining a parade of English-speaking writers that stretches from E. M. Forster to Elizabeth Gilbert -- and makes the experience seem fresh. Dispirited by the routine of life in gloomy Bristol, Cusk and her husband take their two young daughters out of school and board a boat for France to begin a three-month adventure, renting a house in Tuscany. Cusk does not romanticize Italy, nor does she fetishize its sensual pleasures. Though she has a sharp eye for physical detail, she leads with her intellect. Museum visits spark pages-long ruminations on history and religion, including Cusk's own unhappy history within the Catholic Church. Italian cuisine doesn't just taste good; it affirms a childlike desire for simplicity. "The pizza has nothing to hide, no dark interior, no subconscious fascination with its own viscera," she writes. Cusk's restless mind continually leaps from observation to analogy. A beautiful but polluted bay has "a feeling of mystery, almost of secrecy.... It is like a violated woman who refuses to give up her secret." Mystery, not epiphany, is what Cusk craves -- and what she offers readers. "To seek held no particular fear for me," she writes. "It was to find, and to know, and to come to the end of knowing that I shrank from." --Karen Holt

About the Author, Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk was born in 1967. She is the author of the memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother and of six novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award; In the Fold; and Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. In 2003, Cusk was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in Brighton, England.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

English novelist Cusk (Arlington Park) delivers a relatively humorless account of traveling with her husband and two children over three warm months in Italy, from Tuscany to Naples and Rome. She was in search of beauty, because she felt afflicted by England's bland obtuseness nurtured by a cold climate and unappetizing food, and felt Italy's pull through the characters in Tintoretto's painting The Last Supper.Driving through Italy, the family (her husband is mentioned only once; thereafter he is only part of the collective "we") stayed longest in Arezzo, a pastoral spot in eastern Tuscany, where Cusk found herself on a trail named after the 15th-century painter Piero della Francesca; she felt herself on the edge of an "ocean of knowledge" that required "complete immersion." Armed with Vasari's Lives of the Artists, she trekked to find these early Renaissance works of art, many reproduced here (as well as the family's own picturesque snapshots) and records her sympathetic impressions; of Cimabue's tremendously moving portrait of St. Francis, she writes what could also be the artist's visionary declaration: "I am nothing. I am everything." Her observations of the ex-pat community and foreign tourists are critical and grumpy, and the last leg, through Pompeii and Rome, feels anticlimactic. (June)

Library Journal

Many a book has been written about dissatisfaction with everyday life. And many of these have involved escaping to the Italian countryside in search of all things pastoral. In this memoir, Whitbred Award-winning novelist Cusk (Arlington Park) applies her usual philosophical and metaphorical stamp to this recently popular genre. Dissatisfied with life, her family leaves England for three months in Italy, seeking a respite from the daily grind and perhaps alternatives to their current restlessness. While many books in this genre wax poetic about the simple life and food of the authentic Italian experience, Cusk's cultural focus is on art, particularly on the so-called Piero della Francesca trail of Tuscan towns relating to the artist. Though the family makes some attempts at integrating themselves into their community, most of their experience is with other tourists and ex-pats, providing a different view of the Italian escape experience. Much of the work is typical Cusk, lyrical with a touch of sadness in its honesty. A refreshing break from the numerous recent travelers' memoirs.
—Sheila Kasperek

Kirkus Reviews

As elegantly written and astutely observed as her fiction (Arlington Park, 2007, etc.), Cusk's memoir describes looking at art and getting to know the locals from Tuscany to Naples..The author and her husband sold their house in England, took their two daughters out of school and "decided to go to Italy, though not forever. Three months, a season, was as much of the future as we cared to see." Cusk's sharp wit is apparent even when perusing an Italian phrase book, "where Tony and Mario are forever ordering the appropriate coffee…and Marcella, in her loop of eternity, stands on a street corner in Verona asking Fabrizio for directions to the railway station." She's less appealing when bemoaning the physical ugliness of the modern world and snobbishly disdaining tourists who, like her, came to Italy to imbibe beauty. Just because these hapless folks stand in long museum lines—they hadn't the foresight to book tickets ahead as Cusk did—and arrive in tour buses instead of in their own car, they aren't necessarily incapable of appreciating Piero della Francesca or Raphael as much as the sensitive author. Still, Cusk's assessments of art are wonderfully idiosyncratic, as is her analysis of Italian food: "soft and feminine…kind to children." A cranky tour guide is preferable to a boring one, and except when dealing with the tourist hoi polloi, the author is sharp rather than nasty. Her account of a series of tennis matches brilliantly captures people's personalities through their style of play, and her character sketches throughout are equally revealing. Husband and children are never named and deliberately left in vague outline, but we sense the family's closeness and come to agree with Cuskthat her daughters "have been formed, not bereaved," by their sudden uprooting from everything familiar in their lives. Now they have their mother's atmospheric account as a keepsake..Not as agreeable as this season's other Author Abroad memoir, Roland Merullo's The Italian Summer (2009), but more rigorous and compelling.