Animal Spirit

April 15, 2020
Marciano's latest is made up of six longish stories set mostly in a vibrantly described Rome, often involving animals as pets or predators. "Terrible Things Could Happen To Us," about the ripple effect of an unexpected death, sucks the reader in immediately. Told from the multiple viewpoints of the dead man's wife, her married lover, the lover's wife, and both couples' children, who are unhappily aware of their parents' secrets, the story has a layered structure that gives it the rich, leisurely feel of a Fellini film. Though narrowly focused on two characters, "The Girl" also feels larger than its form. A young woman recently out of rehab apprentices with a circus snake charmer who hopes to charm her into loving him. He fails but years later rediscovers her in a satisfyingly bittersweet conclusion. The title story that follows is actually the book's weakest. It cleverly contrasts the tensions between two couples--one newly minted, the other long-standing--who share a vacation cottage. But a lost puppy becomes the too-obvious metaphor for domestic bliss, and the resolution feels pat. In "Indian Land," "the fragility of nature" more successfully reflects human fragility as a happily married woman leaves her husband in Rome to aid an ex-lover having a nervous breakdown in New Mexico (described with gorgeous affection). In "There Might Be Blood," a New Yorker takes a two-month break from her troubled marriage to live in Rome. When hostile sea gulls beset her terrace, she hires a sea gull remover and finds herself obsessed, "like being in love," with his hawk. Avian aggression exposes marital truths the woman has been avoiding. In the final story, "The Call Back," an American film director in Rome meets the woman who inadvertently caused his older sister's death 25 years earlier. Death's lasting power echoes back through the stories, but Marciano's closing lines offer hard-won hope. Emotionally charged issues of commitment, loyalty, and trust explored with dry yet oddly comforting European wit.

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May 15, 2020
Six long, unsettling stories form Marciano's (The Other Language, 2014) latest collection, in which the fates of characters are shaped by the animals whose lives intersect theirs. The feckless heroine of The Girl, newly released from drug rehab, joins a sketchy traveling circus because it gives her the opportunity to handle enormous snakes. In the complex title story, two couples vacationing together on a Greek island find their relationships tested by the way each person reacts to a stray dog. And in the quietly horrifying There Might Be Blood, an American woman, contemplating divorce, vacations in Rome and becomes obsessed with the pair of raptors used to rid the building where she is staying of seagulls. Marciano is a master at making even the most seemingly banal settings seem forbiddingly foreign, as her displaced characters are changed by the places where they confront their darker sides, and she excels at crafting conclusions that are both satisfying and enigmatic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 15, 2020
Marciano’s sharp-eyed and effortlessly graceful collection (after Rules of the Wild), set largely in the author’s native Italy, explores the ways people’s animalistic instincts drive relationships. In “Terrible Things Could Happen to Us,” wealthy family man Sandro falls in love with his yoga teacher, and Marciano’s lack of sentimentality keeps things taut until a devastating denouement, which leaves Sandro speechless, “like an actor who has forgotten his lines.” In “The Girl,” a middle-aged Hungarian tries to convince a young Italian woman to join the circus and help in his snake-charming act. The title story follows two couples sharing an island vacation house as their varying degrees of uncertainty about their futures coalesce around a midnight encounter with a sheep—or is it a poodle?—that may or may not need to be rescued. In “There Might Be Blood,” Diana decamps to Rome to write her long-deferred novel. Rather than writing, she obsesses over seagulls, which plague the city and prevent her from enjoying her terrace near Piazza Navona. Diana decides to enlist Ivo, a falconer, whose birds, Queen and Darko, can hunt the gulls. In this story, and throughout the collection, Marciano skillfully uses her characters’ relationships with animals as metaphors to explore their humanity. Polished and compulsively readable, this is a real treat.

Starred review from September 1, 2020

A woman flies halfway 'round the world to help a perpetually troubled bipolar friend abandoned by his family. A snake charmer recalls the wayward young woman he brought into his act, only to see her flit away to other adventures. A woman's lover slowly fails her after her husband dies, but her young daughters lend their support. And two couples vacationing together witness relationship shifts after they rescue a lost dog. Each scenario could have been a full-scale novel, but Italian author Marciano (The Other Language) deftly packs the evolution of entire lives into the constraints of the short form, clearly delineating the curve of events and the emotions involved. VERDICT Memorable stories told in gracious, unfussy language.

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