The Reluctant Tuscan
How I discovered My Inner Italian
By Phil Doran
This book appeared in my bookcase without notice. I asked my wife about it and she hadn�t a clue, but started reading it. I could hear her chuckling, then laughing out loud a day or two later. �Is it good?� I asked her. �Wonderful,� she replied. Somehow I doubted that, but decided to take a break from the more weighty stuff and picked it up when she finished. After all, I do like Italy and remembered it fondly from when I used to travel there on business decades ago.
Phil Doran was a burned out Hollywood TV writer whose wife convinced him to come with her and be her love in a 300 year old, broken down house she bought in a tiny village in Tuscany. It had to be restored, and the restoring is the basis of the plot � what there is of one.
Did they recognize Michelangelo when he wandered through these hills looking for fresh veins of white marble? Did they even look up from their tilling when Napoleon�s army marched right past here chasing the Austrians out of northern Italy? Did they wonder about the small group of English poets and writers on their way to pay their last respects to Percy Shelley, whose body washed up on Focetta Beach not ten miles from here?
The house creaked, and� a thin finger of dust drizzled out of the crack. It resembled ashes, and I thought about the funeral pyre they had made on the beach for the drowned poet. Percy Shelley once wrote that Italy was �the paradise of exiles,� and that made me think about his widow, Mary Shelley, another expat writer trying to make a life in this alien culture. When I thought about the book that made her famous, I felt a strange kinship with her.
He had her Frankenstein and I had mine.��
During the course of the narrative the Hollywood workaholic is reduced to or elevated to - an inner Italian.
Sound interesting? Not very? But wait. Did you ever lay in bed laughing so hard because of something you read that your stomach hurt? Well, that�s what I guarantee will happen as you read about Phil�s interaction with nature and his new village neighbors. The thing is hilarious and, somehow, touching at the same time, as he is dragged kicking and screaming into paradise. Don�t you wish?
FTS
