A beautiful review of That Summer in Puglia. My thanks to reviewer Ann Marie of NYC-based Lit Wit Wine Dine for communicating with such clarity and warmth her perceptive reading of the novel.
Below are images of short extracts of the review. I encourage you to click here to access the full article on this excellent literary blog site.
And here is another invitation to read the full review on the Lit Wit Wine Dine blog.
Image credits:
Images courtesy of https://litwitwinedine.com/
“I found this to be a totally absorbing debut and loved spending time with the character Tommaso.”
Thank you, Karen Mace, for your warm recommendation of That Summer in Puglia.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Fiction. Tommaso has escaped discovery for thirty years but a young private investigator, Will, has tracked him down. Tommaso asks him to pretend never to have found him. To persuade Will, Tommaso recounts the story of his life and his great love. In the process, he comes to recognise his true role in the events which unfolded, and the legacy of unresolved grief. Now he’s being presented with a second chance – but is he ready to pay the price it exacts? THAT SUMMER IN PUGLIA is a tale of love, loss, the perils of self-deception and the power of compassion. Puglia offers an ideal setting: its layers of history are integral to the story, itself an excavation of a man’s past; Tommaso’s increasingly vivid memories of its sensuous colours, aromas and tastes, and of how it felt to love and be loved, eventually transform the discomforting…
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“This is a stunningly beautiful story, made even more wonderful by having Tommaso as the narrator. […] I cried, I rejoiced, I held my breath – and they are just some of the ways That Summer in Puglia hit me.”
Thank you, Joy Corkery, for your beautiful review of That Summer in Puglia on Joyful Antidotes.
Do you know what every summer needs? A bit of romance. In the form of a book, of course. I have an absolutely great recommendation for you today, one that will melt your heart.
That Summer in Puglia by Valeria Vescina is narrated by Tomasso who has been located by a private investigator thirty years after leaving Puglia. Tomasso asks PI Will to pretend he never found him, which prompts Tomasso to recount his life story, including that one fateful summer that led to a great love and a great loss.
This is a stunningly beautiful story, made even more wonderful by having Tomasso as the narrator. The parts where he speaks to PI Will directly make Tomasso so real and ultimately set him up as a likeable character, a character whom the reader worries about and wants the best for. There are other characters in this book but none…
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A description and an extract of “That Summer in Puglia” on the “Over The Rainbow Book Blog” today. My thanks to Jo Park for kicking off the Bookollective blog tour!
Book Description:
Tommaso has escaped discovery for thirty years but a young private investigator, Will, has tracked him down. Tommaso asks him to pretend never to have found him. To persuade Will, Tommaso recounts the story of his life and his great love. In the process, he comes to recognise his true role in the events which unfolded, and the legacy of unresolved grief. Now he’s being presented with a second chance – but is he ready to pay the price it exacts? That Summer In Puglia is a tale of love, loss, the perils of self-deception and the power of compassion. Puglia offers an ideal setting: its layers of history are integral to the story, itself an excavation of a man’s past; Tommaso’s increasingly vivid memories of its sensuous colours, aromas and tastes, and of how it felt to love and be loved, eventually transform the discomforting tone with…
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In April, the European Literature Network published The Baltics Riveter, a compendium of writing about contemporary fiction from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Publication coincided with this year’s country focus on the Baltics at London Book Fair, where the magazine was widely distributed and enthusiastically received. It contains historical notes, reviews and extracts of some very exciting literature.
The Baltics Riveter is now available also in digital form here. This is the fourth of the European Literature Network’s Riveters. The first was devoted to literature from Poland, on the occasion of the 2017 London Book Fair’s Polish focus. The second, on literature from Russia, coincided with ELNet’s Russian events at the British Library. In The Nordic Riveter of October 2017, five countries were represented: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland.
I normally review English-language editions of novels originally written in Italian, German and French, the languages and cultures I grew up with. But the editor of The Riveter asked whether I might review Estonian author Kai Aareleid’s Burning Cities, translated by Adam Cullen (Peter Owen Publishers, 2018). I’m very grateful for the suggestion: the novel weaves a powerful domestic tale within the larger tapestry of seven decades of Estonian history; most of the story unfolds in the years during which the country was part of the Soviet Union. You can find my article on pp. 58 and 59 of the magazine, or here. I hope it will encourage you to discover Kai Aareleid’s work and more of the riveting literature from the region.
Image credits:
Images courtesy of The European Literature Network.
A presentation of That Summer in Puglia took place on 16 April in the elegant surroundings of the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrave Square. The Institute is a governmental organisation dedicated to promoting knowledge of Italy’s language and culture and to encouraging cultural and scientific collaboration with England and Wales.
My interviewer was Rosie Goldsmith, the acclaimed journalist, presenter, literary critic, Chair of the EBRD Prize, and much more! I’m so grateful to Rosie for her perceptive, engaged and knowledgeable questions.
Our discussion was introduced by Marco Delogu, Director of the Institute, under whose stewardship the organisation has hosted an exciting line-up of events across the arts and sciences. Check out the Institute’s rich schedule of forthcoming and past events here. Guests on the Literature side of the programme have included Roberto Calasso, Sandro Veronesi, Domenico Starnone, Ali Smith, Elif Shafak, Ben Okri, Jhumpa Lahiri… to name but a few.
Todd Swift, Director of Eyewear Publishing, spoke briefly about That Summer in Puglia before leaving Rosie and me to discuss the book in detail. Our conversation touched on plot, characters, setting, themes and structure, but also on aspects of various literary traditions (English, yes, but also Italian, German and French) which have flowed into it because of my personal history.
Many of the questions from the public were focused on the cross-cultural aspects of the novel and on the writing process: why had Puglia inspired me? Why is it an ideal setting for this particular story? Where does my detailed knowledge of Ostuni stem from? Which language do I consider to be my “mother tongue” and why? Having grown up in various countries, what are my views on cultural identity? How long did it take me to develop the plot, and how did I go about it?
Meeting people after the talk was a real joy. It was lovely to discover the variety of emotional resonances the book has for different people. I had been prepared for the fact that each reader will respond to certain aspects of a story more than to others, but I hadn’t expected how warmly people would share profound reflections and anecdotes from their lives. I’m very grateful to them.
Image credits:
The photos ‘Valeria and Rosie’, ‘Signing books’ and ‘Book display at the Institute by The Italian Bookshop’ are courtesy of Rosie Goldsmith, and reproduced with kind permission.
Rights to the photos ‘Marco Delogu’s introduction’ and ‘Todd Swift’s introduction’ are my own.
Waterstones, Kensington, hosted the London launch of That Summer in Puglia on 27 March, just four days after the Oxford Literary Festival debut. The launch took the form of a conversation with award-winning author Rachel Seiffert (A Boy in Winter, The Dark Room, The Walk Home), after an introduction by Alexandra Payne, Managing Editor of Eyewear Publishing. I’m very grateful to Rachel for her support: one of my tutors on the Goldsmiths MA in Creative Writing, she saw the novel develop from its early stages.
Her interview centred on three extracts from That Summer in Puglia, to introduce the audience to the principal characters and their relationships as well as to the book’s style and themes. Our discussion flowed naturally from there. The public contributed questions, comments and personal experiences. The book is set in the southern Italian region of Puglia, but its themes are universal: the perils of unresolved grief; the importance of all forms of love; the relationship between love and virtue.
The Waterstones event being only the second on my schedule, it was heartening to spot in the audience a great number of familiar faces: friends, and Goldsmiths MA faculty and colleagues. I’m so grateful to them all for sustaining me during the process of writing the novel. The Mayor of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Cllr. Marie-Thérèse Rossi, and Cllrs. Addenbrooke and Pascall attended in their official capacity, as a gesture of civic gratitude: I was touched, as I’ve taught creative writing workshops at Kensington Central Library since 2013 on a pro bono basis, but hadn’t expected special thanks. I’m grateful also to Waterstones, and especially to its Kensington events manager, for the organisation and publicity. As a debut author, seeing the shop window filled with my books felt slightly surreal.
The next London presentation of That Summer in Puglia will be at the Italian Cultural Institute on 16 April at 7 pm. The interviewer will be Rosie Goldsmith, the acclaimed journalist, presenter, literary critic and Chair of the EBRD Prize.
Press enquiries: please email publicist Helen McCusker, Booked PR (tel: +44 (0) 7951 078388), or you may contact me here.
Foreign rights enquiries: please contact Eyewear Publishing.
Image credits:
All rights reserved.
That Summer in Puglia had its debut at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival on 23 March. This was Italian Day, when the Festival – in co-operation with the Embassy of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute – annually showcases Italian culture. My interviewer at St. Cross College was University of Oxford academic and Il Sole 24 Ore Arts & Culture contributor Teresa Franco – sensitive, knowledgeable and insightful. We were introduced by poet Todd Swift, Director of Eyewear Publishing. The audience was large, warm and engaging.
The day closed with a memorable Italian Gala Dinner at Lincoln College, hosted by the Director of the Festival, the College Rector and the Italian Embassy. The latter was represented by Minister Counselor Vincenzo Celeste and Head of Culture Federico Bianchi, both of whom had attended the launch of That Summer in Puglia, an honour for which I’m grateful. The Gala Dinner menu was devised by acclaimed chef and cookery writer Eleonora Galasso.
I wrote That Summer in Puglia in English, my literary mother tongue, but the story is set mostly in Puglia (southern Italy), where I was born and grew up. I was educated in Switzerland and the UK, and today live and work in London, but I’ve spent the holidays with family in my native region every year.
Puglia offered an ideal setting: its visible layers of history are integral to the story, a man’s excavation of his past. The region’s distinctive culture provided a framework for testing the characters and exploring the main themes: the role of all forms of love in human life; and the relationship between love and virtue.
I also hope the novel will help readers discover the cultural richness and variety within Southern Italy, by immersing them in an authentically Apulian atmosphere. In Puglia, traces of the past surface in unexpected ways: from the art of its early, Hellenised Illyrian settlers, to Byzantine paintings, Norman churches, and the palaces and fortifications built under the Anjou, the Aragonese, the Venetians and the Spanish. The region’s cuisine and inhabitants bear living testimony to the passage of all these cultures.
The moment of That Summer in Puglia’s debut is also one of gratitude for and to all those who have sustained me throughout the process of writing the novel: family, friends, colleagues, teachers… and the authors and publisher who have encouraged and championed my work. To you all, my deepest thanks. A book about the importance of all forms of love would not have been possible without you.
Press enquiries: please email publicist Helen McCusker, Booked PR (tel: +44 (0) 7951 078388), or you may contact me here.
Foreign rights enquiries: please contact Eyewear Publishing.
Image credits:
Julia Warszewski, all rights reserved.
Madonnas and Miracles – The Holy Home in Renaissance Italy, at the Fitzwilliam Museum until 4 June, is one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in years. I recently wrote a review of it because it deserved shouting about. It’s a model of what exhibitions should be and do: scholarly and yet approachable, painstakingly curated in structure and detail, it subtly and yet boldly debunks facile dichotomies. It’s a highly successful example of how the outcomes of interdisciplinary research (in this case, a four-year European Research Council-funded Synergy project) can be brought to the attention of the general public. The catalogue, too, combines rigorous learning and an accessible tone. You can access my article on the Talking Humanities website of the School of Advanced Study, the UK’s national centre for the support and promotion of research in the humanities.
I’ve been fascinated by the Renaissance for years, but in the last two my studies have focused particularly on women and Southern Italy during this period. My second novel will in fact be set in Puglia during the late 1500s. When I first mentioned my project to an acquaintance, the response was, “But surely, the South didn’t have a Renaissance.” Delving into historical research, including primary sources, swiftly disproves that and other common misconceptions. I’m hopeful that my novel will be a tiny step in that direction. It matters not least because the Renaissance’s legacy extends to the present day in realms and manners on which we don’t usually pause to reflect.
As an example, take the apocryphal story of The birth of the Virgin, a common subject in churches as well as on birth trays and bowls given to new mothers during the Renaissance. In the Madonnas and Miracles exhibition, it is on view in a painting (c. 1440) by the Master of the Osservanza, as well as (though it may be a ‘birth of the Baptist’) in an arresting one by Leandro Bassano. The latter’s Woman at her devotions (c. 1590-1600) shows a widow at her kneeling-stool with a string of rosary beads and a book of hours, in contemplation of a depiction of St. Anne (or St. Elizabeth) attended by other women while her new-born is about to be bathed. The subject had deep meaning for a woman. During pregnancy and labour, she would have prayed to the Virgin – and to St. Margaret, patron saint of childbirth. As in the painting, she too would have been sustained by female relatives, friends and neighbours until the midwife’s arrival and again after the baby’s birth. She would also have recognised the bath in which the baby was to be washed: for a new-born girl, its water would be tipped over ashes from the hearth, and for a boy, thrown outside the house, in a gesture symbolic of their required gender roles. Similarly, a painting such as Pinturicchio’s Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist (c. 1490-1495), also in the exhibition, reflected and reinforced mothers’ responsibility for their children’s religious education. The roots of societal expectations about men and women’s lives went back centuries – some remain entrenched to this day.
Image credits:
Image of Madonnas and Miracles review from the Talking Humanities website.
Rameau’s opera-ballet, Les Fêtes d’ Hébé, has just been performed at the Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre, on 5 and 6 April. This is the UK premiere of the work, nearly three-hundred years after its opening at the Palais-Royal in Paris in 1739. The production was the result of a three-year collaboration between the Académie de l’ Opéra de Paris, les Chantres du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and the Royal College of Music. Let’s hope the cooperation among these artistic centres of excellence will continue post-Brexit.
Despite Rameau’s importance in the history of music, few of his operas have been performed in the UK. A complete and a partial recording of Les Fêtes d’ Hébé by, respectively, Les Arts Florissants (1997) and the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra (1977) received high praise, but the work was never staged here. Why? Two characteristics of French opera of this period will have been major factors: its particular mixture of singing and ballet; and its relative lack of drama and character development, when compared to the work of a contemporary such as Handel.
The music – with its arias, choral pieces and orchestration of extraordinary beauty and richness – deserves to be brought to the attention of the British public. The work is of deep interest also in that it provides intriguing context for that of subsequent composers, including Mozart. Hopefully we won’t have to wait long for the future staging of more of Rameau’s operas.
Thomas Lebrun – director, set designer and choreographer – has opted for a decidedly modern production. The sets are stylised – they work in their own right, and could do without the distracting video-projected backgrounds. The three sections of the opera-ballet are separated by colour, underlining Rameau’s tenuous linking of them by means of a light framing device; at the same time, Lebrun uses ballet to bring out every connecting thread to great effect. The dancers are a marvel of energy and lightness – the only critique is to the costume designer, who could have been more flattering to them. Among the singers, Laure Poissonnier as Cupid, Adriana Gonzales as Sappho and Iphise, and Mikhail Timoshenko as Hymas and Tyrtaeus, stood out for their sumptuous voices, with remarkable command over their vocal ranges and with convincing acting. The choral singers revealed by their performance why Rameau was so widely admired by contemporaries for his mastery of harmony. The orchestra could not have been under a better baton: Jonathan Williams is one of the top Rameau experts in the country – and it showed. The only regret is that Les Fêtes d’ Hébé has been performed in London for only two nights – unsurprisingly, it was sold out. Let’s hope that those unable to obtain tickets won’t have to wait too many years for a revival of this production.
Links to this and others’ reviews of Les Fêtes d’ Hébé can be found on The Opera Critic.com.
Image credits:
Royal College of Music, London, photo by David Iliff. Reproduced under CC License: CC-BY-SA 3.0
Paris Opera full frontal architecture, photo by Peter Rivera. Reproduced under CC License: BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
Portrait of Jean-Philippe Rameau, attributed to Jacques Aved. Photographer unknown. Reproduced under Public Domain License.
Title page of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Traité de l’harmonie. Reproduced under Public Domain License.
Image of TheOperaCritic.com‘s coverage of Les Fêtes d’ Hébé is from its website.
Valeria Vescina 
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