Restoration

October 24, 2011
There’s a lot going on in Olafsson’s fourth novel: it’s 1944, the Allies are advancing, the Germans retreating, and the front line is moving closer to San Martino, the Tuscan estate that English-born Alice Orsini and her Italian husband have restored. But that’s not all: Alice has a guilty conscience and a dead son; her husband has disappeared; a mysterious painting is buried on her property; and she and her staff are running an orphanage and health clinic. The arrival of an Icelandic painter and art restorer should set the stage for fireworks, but doesn’t. Despite many possibilities for drama, Olafsson’s book falls flat. Alice brings her husband up to date via her diary entries, and an omniscient narrator informs us of everything else, none of it with much flair. The prose is rooted in exposition and explanation, and clichés abound. Olafsson, an executive v-p at Time Warner, based Alice on Iris Origo, an aristocratic Englishwoman married to an Italian whose account of staving off the Germans while sheltering orphans and Allied soldiers at her Tuscan villa was published as War in Val D’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943–1944. By the time the fighting heats up and the plot strands all coalesce, the stake that readers should have in the fates of these characters just isn’t there.

December 15, 2011
A soap-opera romance set against a dramatic backdrop of war, art and the hills of Tuscany, from Olafsson (Valentines, 2007, etc.), a top executive at Time Warner. "Nothing had happened yet, but she knew it was going to happen and she was sure that he knew too," reflects a pivotal character on the verge of an affair. And so it happens. At least twice. The intersecting plotlines of two different affairs--and the relationship sparked between two women of different generations and nationalities--provide the complications which this novel resolves in a manner that may not satisfy readers devoted to the genre of historical romance. The title also has multiple references. Toward the end of World War II, a young British woman from a wealthy family, living in Italy, marries an Italian landowner whom her family rejects as beneath her. While searching for a place to settle, she discovers a Tuscan villa in dire need of repair, deemed uninhabitable, and she and her husband begin to restore it. She subsequently has a baby and an affair, and soon it's her crumbling marriage that is in need of restoration. Meanwhile, a young apprentice painter from Iceland finds work restoring classic canvases from earlier centuries, which the sinister art dealer with whom she's having an affair sells to the Germans. Ultimately, both women as well as a painting of questionable origin come together at the restored Tuscan villa, which has become something of a haven for children and others escaping the war. Divided loyalties, political and marital, result in "problems [that are] trivial in the scheme of things. We can see now that the world lies in ruins." The world doesn't end, though pivotal relationships might. Though there are some quasi-literary flourishes here, the interior lives of the characters rarely rise above melodramatic cliché.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2011

Much of Olafsson's fiction (Valentines; Absolution; Walking into the Night) focuses on lives shattered by doomed love affairs, and in this beautifully realized novel of love and betrayal in Tuscany and Rome during the closing months of World War II, he maintains that focus to powerful effect. At its center are two intelligent women whose lives become tragically intertwined during the war. Alice Orsini, an affluent Englishwoman married to the son of an Italian landowner, recklessly begins an affair with a childhood friend. Kristin Jonsdottir, who shows up injured on Alice's property, is a young, impressionable art student in love with a powerful art dealer who's selling Italian masterpieces to the Nazis. Both women have knowledge of a valuable Caravaggio painting being sought by high-ranking officers in the Allied and the German armies. And both are ruined not by the war but by destructive love affairs. VERDICT Olafsson masterfully portrays the interior lives of these women, creating a richly complex portrait of love and passion at work even as his harrowing depictions of daily life in war-torn Italy add additional depth and power to the novel. Enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary and historical fiction.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2012
In the summer of 1944, in Tuscany, the lives of two women, both with damaging clandestine love affairs behind them, intersect. British-born Alice, whose marriage to Marchese Claudio Orsini palls after the excitement of restoring their rundown country estate, named San Martino, embarks on a long-term affair with a childhood friend, whose comfort she seeks as her young son, Giovanni, dies of meningitis. Claudio, unable to comprehend Alice's absence from their dying son's bedside, vanishes, leaving Alice to manage the estate as the German occupying forces approach. Art student Kristin, who falls in love, in Rome, with her married mentor and employer, art expert and restorer Robert Marshall, executes the perfect postaffair artistic revenge, which ultimately takes her to San Martino, which now shelters partisans, escaped Allied prisoners of war, and more. With a backdrop of the ravages of WWII, particularly as they affect the civilian population, Olafsson casts a keen eye on Germany's wartime acquisition of artistic masterpieces. A beautifully written literary novel of love, betrayal, reconciliation, and art.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)