Deal | Bomarzo

[Bomarzo] is a novel that will make any reader happy…. [A] novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around. Roberto Bolaño
A lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian towns famously bizarre Garden of the Monsters.
Forty miles north of Rome, near the village of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini created a park of monstrous statuary in which the nightmares of the Renaissance stand preserved in stone. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainezone of the major Argentine novelists of the twentieth centuryre-creates this dark and legendary duke as a briliant memoirist. From beyond the grave, in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez’s own Buenos Aires, Orsiniwho now knows his Freud and has read Lolitalooks back at the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life.
Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of a hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain. It is also a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it is an immersive story told in a sumptuous stylelike one of Poe’s Italian tales rewritten by Proustas Gregory Rabassa’s translation beautifully conveys.