Reviews for Italy '93 (Berlitz Pocket Guides)

The average rating for Italy '93 (Berlitz Pocket Guides) based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-08-14 00:00:00 Stephen Graham Herbie, as we were wont to call the Love and Lover-man, lived on Lago di Garda, where I babysat my two year old grandson at Riva del Garda while his Mom was off working for a London law firm most of the week. With classic errors in the Italian I had read for 34 years, I reassured him, "Non preoccuparti, tua Momma sta andando," Don't worry, your Mom is going away. Herbie was further south, past the lemon groves; in his day prior to WWI, my Riva was on the Austrian border, and there was smuggling across the mountains. Lawrence was down in Gargnano with its two nearby monasteries, San Tommaso up on a hill above the town, the "Church of the Eagle," and San Francesco right on the shore. Looking for the path up to the "plateau of heaven," "I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village"(26). These passages led to old steps, used for centuries as occasional urinals. I first found these narrow paths in fortified hilltowns around Carrara like Nicola and Fontia. Wonderful to walk, the cart-wide steps with a rounded lip for mule-drawn carts. At Nicola I saw pieces of chicken thrown out of second-story windows down to the pavement for cats and maybe ravens. DHL wrote this so young that his writing is better toward the end: "one could almost touch the stillness as one could touch the walls"(162), and "the strange, glassy translucency of the snow-lit air"(161). Lawrence goes to the Theater at Salò on Garda. He sees D'Annunzio, Ibsen's Spettri, which he considers depressingly phallic in the Scandinavian way, crossed with Italian phallicism (one thinks of the engraved phalluses at Pompei doorways), Good Luck. One night his padrone, the Di Paoli, invite him to Amleto, uno drama inglese. The evening honors the Actor-Director Enrico, sturdy short lead, on whom DHL is merciless. DHL arrives late, near the end of Act I: "Enrico looked a sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet…made him look stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs"(73). We may forget that for all his confrontation of bourgeois British manners, Herbie was thoroughly British in his valuing of dress and appearance'the aristocratic leg, the tallish figure. He accuses the whole cast, essentially, of not being English. The King and Queen were "touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman…The King, her noble consort…had new clothes. His body was real enough, but it had nothing to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by themselves"(74). But Lawrence is also very critical of Hamlet the character: "His nasty poking into his mother…his conceited perversion with Ophelia, make him always intolerable…repulsive, based on self-dislike." Enrico played him as "the modern Italian, suspicious, isolated, self-nauseated, laboring in a sense of physical corruption." A later Italian historian, Fabio Cusin, would agree on the suspicion, isolation and self-disgust, in his Antistoria d'Italia (1970). DHL says To be, or not… "does not mean to live or not to live…[but the] supreme I, the King and Father. To be or not to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be"(77). He runs on about the deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, or the desire to be immortal. He argues for the ancients, the supreme I, the Ego ruled, but for Christians, supremacy involves renunciation, surrender to the Not-Self. The pagan Ego became the greatest sin: Pride, the way to total damnation. A US citizen in 2018 cannot help but wonder how the "Christian Right (wing)" came to forget the worst Christian sin of Pride, the foolish pride of the US Trumpster president. And DHL has his own Brexit: "I was free in this heavy, ice-cold air, alone. London, far away below, beyond, England, Germany, France...this continent all beneath was unreal, false, non-existent in its activity...It was so big, yet it had no significance"(163). And a century later, DHL has our global encroachment and environmental extinctions right: "the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating harshness of the advance of the industrilized world upon the world of nature, that is so painful" (160).

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-13 00:00:00 MONTE W WILCOX D.H Lawrence journey's through Italy in an extremely unhelpful travel guide. I was going to write the entirity of this review as a snarky 'I'd never finished a Lawrence book before. Now I have and I'm delighted to know I don't have to read D.H bloody Lawrence anymore'. I admitedly went into this with prejudice against the author after all my previous failed attempts at his other works and though I may have chosen a bad work in his bibliography, I swear I forced myself to find some good points and my God did I struggle. His depiction of Italians is borderline bestial, like some pith helmeted colonialist admiring the marvellous manners of the natives, with him viewing an old woman spinning as somehow symbolising the universe in her simplicitly (in a disjointed, bizarre quasi-religious rant that goes on for pages and pages, while she clearly wishes Lawrence would piss off and stop staring at her). These odd indulges in religious fervor seem to strike like a brief fever, and at one point Lawrence literally switches from a long diatribe on the holy trinity to a discussion on citrus fruit prices, which was disconcerting to say the least. He also has a habit of depicting most men like lumbering muscle with steaming overtones of sexual preadator, women as wholely seperate creatures, and both prefer emotion to thinking. I'm not entirely sure where Lawrence gets the confidence to psychoanalyse an entire nation's sexual and emotional habits, especially when his evidence seems to be the theatre and small snippets of culture. There may be some accuracy in his observations of Catholic life, but I hardly imagine the burbling git a trustworthy authority. Lawrence also has the habit of repeating the same word over and over again, seemingly for no reason other than he lost his thesaurus back in Geneva. Most of his text seems unnecessary, either for aesthetics or information, the most egrecious example of pointless words to me being: 'But Agamemnon, king and Lord, was not infallible. He was fallible'. Yes, thank you, Lawrence, as I must have an IQ on par with a ham sandwich I clearly needed that clarification. That painful prose 'choice' eases as the book goes on, thankfully, as does his ectasy sermons, but the Italy he creates doesn't really inspire or fascinate. Il Duro, a handsome man who claims he's 'seen too much' so now can't get married, and who Lawrence describes in the same way a primatologist would talk of the sad and almost human eyes of a gorilla, gets his own little section and Lawrence's borderline homoerotic admiration. The author repeatedly asks the poor sod the same question over and over in some search for an unstated meaning, all while recieving the same broken answer and meaningful stares, while I'm sitting there wondering if deleting a book from an e-reader will be as satisfying as frisbeeing a paperback from my window. Lawrence gets some things right. I liked his description of a dance and the many odd crucifixes he discovers, including an eerie broken one which will likely stay in my head, but ultimately this feels like a very self-indulgent and solipstic pile of tosh. My final take away is that Lawrence is less a philosopher and more that weird bloke on the bus soliloquising his gap year to you whether you like it or not, gargling the same sentences over and over, as he sups his Dad's Johnny Walker from an elaborately decorated canteen you know he bought in Minsk, because he gives you long, creepy speculations on the seller's psyche. Also he probably has an erection. I remain not a fan.