Word: silvestris
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...REAL SILVESTRI (188 pp.)-Mario Soldati-Knopf...
...really know what makes his best friend tick, but Italian Author Soldati, a movie director as well as a resourceful novelist, knows that a woman can best supply the answers, or at least plant them in the wondering mind. Who was the real Silvestri? The mild, sweet, physically unattractive fellow who wrote poetry, loved nature and lived meagerly off his ancestral estate-or an unsuccessful lover who was willing to use blackmail if necessary to bring his friend's wife to bed and marriage? There are several replies of sorts in this excellent short novel, a book that suggests...
When Aurora comes to Italy from France at war's end, she brings gentle Silvestri to his knees at first meeting. Unfortunately for him, she is completely dominated by an American friend of his who has easily slipped from military government into real estate. Aurora's show-girl history is slightly tawdry, but her stunning figure and simple mind persuade Silvestri that she is his great love. To Aurora, Silvestri is a hapless, tiresome romantic. What she wants is a real man, preferably one with money. As it turns out, she finds both, but not in the same...
...story is unfolded five years after Silvestri's death by a mutual friend, a middle-aged Italian lawyer who looks on Silvestri as a kind of saint. The heart of the novel lives in the juxtaposed pictures that emerge from the recollections of the devoted friend and the disgusted woman. By the time Aurora is finished with her account, the old friend has been shaken, and by book's end he knows an old truth but one not easily come by: that people know about others only what is comfortable to know. The "real Silvestri...
...adventures themselves retain the timeless quality of myth: the gigantic Cyclops is chillingly acted by Umberto Silvestri, and his howls of frenzy at the loss of his eye are enough to shatter cliffs; the immortal and immoral Circe (also played by Silvana Mangano) can call up tempests or turn men into porkers with equal ease. The screen writers have added one imaginative touch to the incident of the Sirens' rock: as his galley is rowed past that bone-littered shore. Ulysses, bound to the mainmast, is driven to frantic despair by the pleading voices of his wife...