(Although Jeanine has already reviewed this one, I enjoyed it more than she did and decided to throw my review up here as well.)
★★★★½
I was already predisposed to like this since Denys' The Flesh and the Devil blew me away. She'd had to have really screwed up to make me dislike it. In the end, this book was just as good.The first person POV of the heroine didn't bug me at all (sometimes it does), and I thought it perfectly complemented the story of an illiterate tavern maid plucked out of her lowly life and station and placed among the glittering and utterly foreign court of the local Duke. She's adrift, uncertain, and scared, and the use of the first person conveyed her journey from innocent girl to entrapped (and enchanted) mistress perfectly. I also thought that it made Domenico just as attractively and terrifyingly mysterious to the reader (well, this one anyway!) as Felicia herself found him to be.
Denys wrote so many beautiful passages capturing Felicia's tormented thoughts and emotions in Domenico's web that it's impossible to quote them all, but suffice to say that the tone was very dark and gothic and evocative of the times without being detailed on the historical end of things. Even though I wasn't told every little thing about 16th century Italy and court etiquette and manners, the settings, characters, and atmosphere of paranoia, decadence, and bloody state rivalries were all very clear. It's one of those "I felt like I was right there" stories.
Also, while I'm not a fan of the hero grovel, I did enjoy this one immensely. Talk about grand gestures. It was just as broad and absolute as the story that came before it was dark and crazy, and the "staginess" of it (if you will) fit in with the melodramatic sweep of the plot and florid characters. Right from the get-go, it seemed like ripe material for an opera and I spent the entire book thinking of it in those terms. Made for a very pleasurable experience and inspired my dream cast.
I'm dinging it a half star for the last quarter of the book where the plot started to slog a bit and I was impatient for Domenico and Felicia to finally come to an open dialogue (for lack of a better term). Their pride really kept the grease from getting in the gears to keep things rolling.
Denys is a very studied writer, one of the very very few where I can see the painstaking care of her craft and not get annoyed at the artificiality of it. The sheer beauty of some of the passages, the way she can paint a scene, convey a glance or caress or whisper have few equals in my reading experience. She can couch the horrific and terrifying in such a way that it seems like a song (because in real life Domenico and Felipe Tristan in "The Flesh and the Devil" would have any sane woman running for the exits or grabbing a gun). She's a master of creating a beautiful blend of people and place and plots to make an intriguing, surreal "romance."
All the passion, murder, torture, intrigue and war in snazzy Renaissance fashions had me thinking in operatic terms right off, so here's my dream cast.....
Besides having the obvious asset to play Domenico (and being my image of the glorious bastard before I even picked up the book), baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky has the type of voice that would make you gladly shed your virtue, inhibitions, and moral compass.
Sticking with the Russians, I'd cast Anna Netrebko as Felicia. Bit of Hollywood casting, operatic version, but she'd do justice to the part. And she can sing on her back, so that's a plus. ;-)
For Domenico's bastard brother Alessandro, a resentful and rapacious playboy, I envision a lyric tenor (just because they always get the girl, the baritones don't, and this is my opera). Since he even looks like Sandro (square, dark, coarsening features), Marcelo Álvarez will do nicely:
Now, Piero. Oh Piero! I loved this guy. He is Domenico's former lover (woot!) and wants Felicia even before Domenico can discard her, just so he can have part of Domenico again. (How hot and twisted is that?) So the role goes to my new opera peep, spinto tenor Jonas Kaufmann. As well as being hella pretteh, he can sing, too (Holy Heldentenor, Batman! It's been a long time since Wagner's twin sister-lovin' hero both looked and sounded so hot.)Ippolito, Domenico's secretary and Felicia's faithful adherent, is definitely for a sweet-voiced tenor. Can't get any sweeter than Juan Diego Flórez:
Maddalena, Domenico's discarded mistress who he tosses to Alessandro like a bone to an slavering dog, is a no-brainer. Someone with a raging inner bitch is required, and this soprano can just tap into the dwama that is her marriage and diva-among-divas career behavior. So, Angela Gheorghiu:
And since every opera needs a bass, that's going to be the Archbishop, who is the only thing standing between Domenico's dukedom and retribution by the Pope, and is an inveterate schemer. Ferruccio Furlanetto could probably sink his teeth into the role and steal the show, like he usually does with anything he touches:
If you got this far, thanks for humoring me. Opera fans need to geek out occasionally, too. Sorry there was no Gerard Butler. Sometimes he simply can't be shoehorned into a part. ;-)
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