I Give It to You

May 4, 2020
An Italian villa and the family that owns it capture the imagination of an American writer in Martin’s intimate, disquieting latest (after the collection Sea Lovers). In the summer of 1983, novelist and professor Jan Vidor rents a Tuscan apartment in a converted outbuilding at the Villa Chiara. Her landlady is elegant, well-educated Beatrice Salviati Bartolo Doyle. Beatrice and her mother occupy one part of the villa, while cousins Luca and Mimma another. As Jan and Beatrice become friends, Beatrice begins to share family stories. Her grandfather, she recounts, was a wealthy Florence banker named Giacomo Salviati. In 1905, Giacomo’s oldest son, Sandro, refuses to give up the grocer’s daughter he loves, so Giacomo confines Sandro to an insane asylum. After Giacomo dies, Sandro’s brother Marco, an avid Mussolini supporter, squanders much of the family fortune. This family history (including how Sandro was shot by fascists, partisans, or perhaps his own brother) inspires Jan to write a novel about the Salviatis. Martin’s engrossing tale explores relationships among family members and workers over four generations, occasionally in a rambling manner, though the prose remains alluring. Martin’s masterly descriptions of the villa and its gardens are transportive. Evoking the charms and complexities of 20th-century Italy, Martin offers a thought-provoking reflection on writing, friendship, family, and betrayal.

June 1, 2020
Yes, the narrator of Martin's new novel is a middle-aged American woman vacationing in Tuscany, but this prickly, uncomfortably relevant dive into personal and societal ethics is no escapist romance. Creative writing professor Jan Vidor stays at Villa Chiara as a paying guest for the first time during the summer of 1983. The villa's owner is Beatrice, herself a professor at an unnamed American college. Beatrice's last name, Doyle, comes from her failed marriage to a Cape Cod oysterman's son she met while attending graduate school at Boston College, but she was born into a family of aristocrats who split their time between Florence and their country estate, Villa Chiara. During more visits together over the next 20 years, Beatrice shares tales with Jan, connecting family history to 20th-century Italian history, particularly the Fascist era. Jan sees the family's central tragedy as the death of Uncle Sandro, a gentle romantic who spent much of his adult life in an insane asylum but died violently under murky circumstances outside the villa in 1943. Believing Beatrice has given her permission to use the family stories, Jan writes them into a book; chapters become a novel within the novel here. Jan's narrative pits innocence (spiritual, idealistic Sandro) against evil (his Fascist, capitalistic, misogynistic brother Marco). Yet the changes she witnesses at the villa and in Beatrice over time reveal harsh realities about class and capitalism in Italy (and America). Beatrice, the novel's true central enigma, originally went to America to reinvent herself through education. She married but never took her working-class ex-husband seriously and continues to have problematic relationships with her mother and her son, who paradoxically has chosen to live in Germany. Yet after spending most of her life in America, Beatrice remains an outsider there while her identity as Italian landed gentry seems to crystallize as the working-class locals her family has patronized for generations take financial control. Martin parses personal and social politics with methodical care and a reserved tone reminiscent of Edith Wharton.

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Starred review from July 1, 2020
Martin (The Ghost of the Mary Celeste, 2014) limns the lives of three generations of an Italian family through the eyes of an American author. Jan Vidor first visits lovely Villa Chiara in Tuscany in 1983, forming a fast friendship with Beatrice, the villa's owner. Beatrice starts to share stories of her family with Jan, uttering the words "I give it to you," when she sees how taken Jan is with her family history. Jan takes this as license to fictionalize the story of Beatrice's family. There's the sad fate of Beatrice's uncle Sandro, confined to an asylum for decades only to meet a tragic end when he is finally freed; Beatrice's other uncle, Marco, a Fascist who sided with Mussolini during World War II; and Beatrice's own flight to America after the war ended and her subsequent romance with a Bostonian. Amid gorgeous descriptions of the lush Italian countryside, Martin explores the complex plight of one family against the backdrop of the latter half of the twentieth century, mixing in issues of class and ownership of both home and personal history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2020

In the Kafka/Orange Prize-winning Martin's latest title (after The Ghost of the Mary Celeste), American academic Jan rents an apartment in a villa in Tuscany for the summer to work on her biography of Mussolini. But she's finally more interested in her hostess, ultimately betraying the woman by telling her story.

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