Novel set in COPENHAGEN at Christmas
A strange love story set in VENICE
7th December 2023
The Lover of No Fixed Abode by Carlo Frutterro and Franco Lucentini, a strange love story set in Venice.
Translated by Gregory Dowling.
Carlo Frutterro and Franco Lucentini were a very well known literary duo in Italy for many years, until Lucentini’s death (by suicide) in 2002. The Lover of No Fixed Abode was written in 1986 and has only recently been translated into English by Venice-based author Gregory Dowling. It was clearly a labour of love. The plot of the book is intriguing. An aristocratic Roman lady art dealer and an apparently down at heel English tour guide meet on a plane heading into Venice. The attraction in instant and is followed by three intense days of love making. They are inseparable. They together attend the most ‘in’ social events in Venice. He abandons his tour group and gets wholly involved in her world of art dealing, art fraud, and scamming.
But who is he? He appears to speak every known language and to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of history. How can this be true for a lonely tour guide? All is revealed (up to a point) before the book ends.
The story is fun (even though it does at times go down rabbit holes…) and well worth the read. But there is no doubt, to my mind, that the real hero of the work is Venice itself. So much has been written about the city that it is hard to imagine anything new. But fresh and relevant voices are brought to the subject. Frutterro and Lucentini (and, indeed, Dowling who corrected a couple of minor errors made by the authors) have offered new insights into Venice.
The book is recommended – as much for the descriptions of Venice as for the story itself.
Tony for the TripFiction team
Join team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) Threads (threads.net/@tripfiction)
Please wait...
