Word: ippolita
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Last year's princely book was The Leopard, written largely in his 60th year by the late Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Duke of Palma. The current entry in the duke-of-the-year club is Ippolita, written by 75-year-old Alberto Denti di Pirajno, Duke of Pirajno. The resemblances between the two novels do not end there. They are both set in the 19th century amid the first revolutionary stirrings of Italian unification. To match The Leopard's feudally lavish autocratic hero, Don Fabrizio, there is the new book's feudally parsimonious autocratic heroine, Ippolita. Both books...
Snopeses of San Lio. Though she acquires titles, Ippolita stems from a clan that was born below the stairs in other people's manors. The Raugeos are Italian versions of Faulkner's wily Snopeses, who grab, trick and weasel their way into the landed gentry. Befriending a Raugeo is as safe as petting a crocodile. Raised to overseer by a count, Ippolita's greatgrandfather snaps up all the nobleman's holdings to make the Raugeos the richest, and the meanest, landowners in the town of San Lio. He passes on the family faith: the land...
This was the age in which Metternich said that "the levels of man commenced with baron." Ippolita marries one-Baron Konrad von Grueber-and it becomes the ruefully comic epic of Ippolita's skinflint life to retrieve her one uncharacteristic act of giving herself to him. The baron is a madcap giant of a hussar, a Homeric drinker and eater, an impenitent gambler, an indefatigable skirt chaser. Ippolita, to whom purse strings are the only heart strings, chokes as her beans-and-mush menus give way to roast pigs, shank sausage and plump capons. She likes to dress like...
Grave Ghost. The baron returns, some years later, to leave one last raffish memento. But with his death of a heart at tack, melodrama begins smothering the life of Author Denti di Pirajno's novel. At novel's end, Ippolita is not only the sole mistress, but also the greatest monster of the House of Raugeo...
...with the authoritative relish of a man who has grown up with his subjects without ever growing tired of them. He brilliantly evokes the Italian love of the land that borders on mania and some times crosses that border. The past itself is perhaps the most memorable character in Ippolita, and it is as haunting, grave and startling in its reality as Hamlet's father's ghost...