Reviews for Romola

The average rating for Romola based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-07 00:00:00 Derek Starnky While I was reading this book, I spent a lot of time looking at a satellite map of Florence in an effort to follow in the footsteps of George Eliot as she led her characters through the labyrinthine streets of the city, and in and out of its famous buildings. While poring over the map, I noticed that the satellite image must have been taken early on a very sunny morning because the shadow cast by the Palazzo Vecchio, situated on the eastern corner of the piazza della Signoria, stretches westwards across the piazza and reveals the height of the turret of the building clearly even though its dimensions are almost invisible in an aerial view. When I looked more closely, I noticed that the shadow of the famous Duomo was equally clear, giving the viewer an idea of the beauty and monumentality of the construction that is impossible to guess at simply from the aerial view. The shadow of the dome of the San Lorenzo church also stands out as does the bell tower of the Badia church which stretches over several roof tops and even right across the via Dante Alighieri and down a side street. I was chuffed by the importance which the early morning sun gave to all the monuments of Florence that are so significant to the plot of this book. Romola is a long novel and I spent a long time reading it. When I reached the end, I didn't feel ready to write a review so I set it aside. Today, I opened it up again and reread the preface, which I'd all but forgotten. In that preface, George Eliot conjures up an anonymous fifteenth century citizen of Florence (whom she calls a Shade or, alternatively, a Spirit), and whom she makes revisit the city in her own time, the 1860s. Let us suppose that such a Shade has been permitted to revisit the glimpses of the golden morning, and is standing once more on the famous hill of San Miniato, which overlooks Florence from the south. I'd noticed that sentence when I'd first read the preface but only because I remembered that the San Miniato Church is part of the view from EM Forster's famous Room with a View, though he describes it in the evening: the facade of San Miniato shone brilliantly in the declining sun. The connection I'd made with Forster distracted me from what Eliot was doing in the rest of the Preface. On the reread, I understood why she makes her Shade cast his eye over the city from his vantage point on the hill of San Miniato, and why she makes him pick out certain monuments such as the San Lorenzo church, the Duomo and the high turret of the Palazzo Vecchio, where he served as a member of the Signoria or city council. The first time I read the preface, I didn't realise how important the city council would be in the novel, nor the significance of the impressions Eliot gives her Shade regarding a certain Prior of the time: That very Quaresima or Lent of 1492 in which our Shade died, still in his erect old age, he had listened in San Lorenzo, not without a mixture of satisfaction, to the preaching of a Dominican Friar, named Girolamo Savonarola, who denounced with a rare boldness the worldliness and vicious habits of the clergy, and insisted on the duty of Christian men not to live for their own ease when wrong was triumphing in high places, and not to spend their wealth in outward pomp."He was a noteworthy man, that Prior of San Marco," thinks our Spirit; "somewhat arrogant and extreme, perhaps, especially in his denunciations of speedy vengeance...But a Frate Predicatore who wanted to move the people'how could he be moderate? He might have been a little less defiant and curt, though, to Lorenzo de' Medici, whose family had been the very makers of San Marco: was that quarrel ever made up? And our Lorenzo himself, with the dim outward eyes and the subtle inward vision, did he get over that illness at Careggi... Now, having read the book, I can only admire the perfect backdrop Eliot painted in that preface. She imagines that her Shade might have died in 1492, and when we begin the novel, we realise that it is set in the year 1492, and not only has the Shade died but also the ailing Lorenzo de' Medici, ending the long reign of the Medicis, while in Rome, the death of Pope Innocent the Eight has allowed the reign of the Borgias to begin. And the reformer Prior of San Marco, Girolamo Savonarola, the bane of the papacy, is at the height of his popularity. 1492 is the beginning of a very turbulent period in Florentine history. It was really no surprise to me that George Eliot was good at painting backdrops. I'd noticed it in all of the novels I'd read already - the geography and the history, the religious movements and the politics, the homes and their furnishings, the background characters and their costumes, all is very vivid, very accurate. She gives us real places, real times and people we can believe in. I admit that I was tempted to think that when she moved her stage from the English countryside of her own century to an Italian city four centuries before her time, the challenge might prove too great. Not at all. The Florentine streets she leads us through feel just as real as the English Midlands of The Mill on the Floss or of Adam Bede, and the rendering of the political upheavals in Florence during the last decade of the 1400s ring very true indeed. George Eliot did her research very well. I found myself wondering about how she did all the research. From my twenty-first century vantage point in front of a satellite map, I conjured her up in my imagination. I placed her in the Laurentian library and watched as she pored over the writings of the famous Florentines of the period such as Dante, Poliziano, Macchiavelli, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. I imagined her walking through the streets of Florence, visiting churches and palazzos. I saw her in the Uffizi Gallery, standing in front of a painting by Piero di Cosimo, perhaps his Bacchus and Ariadne, thinking how she might use the beautiful pair as models for the human interest story she knew she had to somehow graft onto her political and religious themes. I saw her crossing the piazza della Signoria towards the Palazzo Vecchio, and pausing by the ancient stone lion to reflect on all the momentous happenings that had taken place inside that building and on the piazza itself. I watched as she went down to the Ponte Vecchio and crossed the Arno to Oltrarno where she turned left along by the river until she reached the Via de' Bardi. There, she stopped in front of a large sombre stone building pierced by small windows, and surmounted by a loggia or roof terrace. "This is it," she thought, "this is where I'll place my Ariadne. And I'll call her Romola. Romola de' Bardi."

Review # 2 was written on 2014-08-25 00:00:00 Carl Anderson The GRAND NOVEL goes on The GRAND TOUR In a deep curve of the mountains lay a breadth of green land, curtained by gentle tree-shadowed slopes leaning towards the rocky heights. Up these slopes might be seen here and there, gleaming between the tree-tops, a pathway leading to a little irregular mass of building that seemed to have clambered in a hasty way up the mountain-side, and take a difficult stand there for the sake of showing the tall belfry as a sight of beauty to the scattered and clustered houses of the village below. The Grand Tour or tourism with style. This mode is gone now. But this agreeable and leisurely read has felt like a reward since it is no longer possible to travel in such a style. With this novel I have travelled to the Florence of the end of the 15C holding the hand of Mary Ann Evans. Having visited the place recently--also with an imaginary Renaissance as my objective--with her Romola, I was eliminating one and a half centuries in the time gap, and able to enjoy a different perspective to my own. No Florence-card, no museum lines, no ubiquitous photographing, no queuing at Il Due Fratellini to grab a cheap panini to eat sitting down on the stairs of the Loggia dei Lanzi. Instead, I could enjoy a serene dilation, a grandeur in observation, ample panoramas, expanded time, careful inspection of details, profound insight, and thorough knowledge. And this even though Evans occasionally makes the reader aware that, no matter how closely to the Florentine Renaissance she strives to take us, the text is dealing with a foregone age. As victim of the hurried cadence of my age, my first impression was that the novel would be thin, in spite of its length. Its first pages felt like watercolours, with diffuse forms and too much gentleness. It took me a while to tune into its amiable, distended, dilated pace. But when I finally did I could then treasure Evans' erudition, imagination, and sharpness of mind. Evans took on a challenging task by choosing a very complicated period in the history of Florence. The aftermath at the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico saw the messy attempt at a new Republic; the invasion by the French king Charles VIII; the return to a fundamentalist and apocalyptic practice of religion; the political machinations of the Pope Alexander VI, etc. This is a period that often historians just brush through; the complexities are so controversial. But it was after all the fertile ground for Machiaveli to develop his political thought. Bravely setting her story in such a scenario Evans does not skirt the issues. She travelled three times to Tuscany to supplement her already astoundingly strong education in the classics --we would now qualify her as a scholar. She was still very young when she first visited, in 1840, but she returned twice in the very early 1860s, spending several weeks in preparation for her novel. This is her only work that is set outside of England and in a somewhat remote age. It was first published in 1862 in serialized form in a magazine. Her confidence in treating this complex and rich period shows throughout the book. She distinguishes comfortably between the differing modes of government of the various republics, as well as between the different religious orders, major and minor. She gives us a fascinating good account of the functioning and origins of the circle of Neo-platonic humanists gathering around the Orci Rucellai. She gets close to the conspiracy against the Republic that brought the execution of five illustrious men who were close to the Medici. She keeps a steady pace when tackling the precise state of the complex classical revival, aware, for example, that Homer was a new discovery. There is no need to wait for a feminist revival to learn about the existence of the extraordinary Cassandra Fedele. I was also very intrigued by her choice of the idiosyncratic painter, Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521), out of the overwhelming array of superb painters from that time. In realizing her sound command of her material, we cannot forget that Evans was writing before Walter Paters' The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), the critic who first singled out Botticelli (and now part of the kitschy repertoire), before Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was translated into English, and at the time when Jules Michelet, the man who coined the word 'Renaissance', was still working on his massive Histoire. Writing this fictional approach to the period, at the time she did, Evans demonstrates what an extraordinary woman she was. For she certainly had her own ideas. And these she could develop because she gave herself time to observe, time to think, time to ponder. Hers was Grand Time. For example, she is critical of Machiavelli, for he is too much bitten with notions, and has not your power of fascination....He has lost a great chance in life.... She also gives a fascinating portrayal of the controversial Girolamo Savonarola, now enveloped in his black legend and easily derided, but who emerges through her pen as an unquestionably remarkable man. To expanded time she could weld her most outstanding gift, her acute perception. She had complemented her studies and reading with a power of observation, of objects, settings, customs, clothing, that had impressed Anthony Trollope. But the full expansion in her observation is devoted to the human soul. With her writing it becomes a landscape of wide and profound vistas. Consequently, her main characters, the fictional ones, engage her reader for their complexity. It is true that her Romola has been criticized because she remains well footed in the age in which she was really born. She is a Victorian sweet young lady and we suspect that she is made out of Evans' own nature. And yet, Romola, in spite of her sweetness and initial gullibility, draws the interest of a 21st century reader because her personality develops along the copious pages. She undergoes a gradual éducation sentimentale. With the dilation of the grand manner we follow her as she questions many given values and social structures, matrimony being one of them, and she keeps our interest because she does not fall prey to black & white doubts. There is always subtlety in her reactions and her thinking. For me the most interesting character, though, was Tito, the non-villain villain, because he is, despairingly, so highly believable. His moral deterioration is not entirely blameworthy. Clad in overpowering charm, amorality can be so irresistible, that it will gain the upper hand. As a Grand Novel, Romola, has the unquestionable Grand Narrator, the omniscient voice that moves seamlessly in and out of the minds of the characters. And concomitant with it, the charged morals pepper the text for they were the alibi that sustained and defended fiction as a worthy literary genre. The moralistic maxims feel like the classical ruins dispersed the landscapes of the Grand Tour. Signs of permanence. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that is also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled. Laws that govern human behaviour. As a strong body struggles against fumes with the more violence when they begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against fantasies with all the more alarmed energy when they threaten to govern in the place of thought. . But in Florence, in spite of Savonarola, in spite of Evans' morality, and like everywhere else, Vanities have not left the Piazza della Signoria. If Savonarola tried to destroy them with his Bonfires of Vanities, and Evans attempted to dissolve them with her edifying novel, the façades around the square are now lined up with the Vanities on display and on offer at the Gucci, Vuitton et al shops..., around the plaque on the floor indicating where he he was burnt, in his own bonfire. Some aspects of humanity, in spite of differences in the geographical and historical contexts, do not seem to change.