Pasquale's Nose
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
A refreshing antidote to the saccharine charms of Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Frances Mayes' Under the Tuscan Sun, this is the quirky and hilarious memoir of a criminal lawyer who gives up his New York practise to spend a year in the Etruscan town of Sutri, near Rome, where he moves - reluctantly - with his artist wife and baby. Himself something of an eccentric from a bizarre Nebraskan family, he has spent his adult life living in hotels; and in Sutri, he heads straight for the caf- in the main square. From there he observes the baroque events of small-town life, conjures up a cast of Italian eccentrics (including Pasquale and his hypersensitive organ of smell), and relishes the weirdness and the wonder of Sutri's history, folklore, architecture and above all its food - particularly the notorious 'fagioli regina' (beans in a tomato and pig skin sauce) and the annual Bean Festival. Part of the delight of reading this memoir is that it not only evokes the sights and smells of an ancient and little-known town in Southern Italy, and brings its people to extraordinary life, but it also reveals the irresistible foibles and philosophy of a talented and unusual mind. Funny, philosophical and surprisingly moving, this is the story of how a rootless American finds home in the most unexpected places and how Pasquale and his compatriots put life into perspective in the strangest way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First-time author Rips, formerly a successful trial lawyer, ran off to the Etruscan village of Sutri with his painter wife and new baby. In Sutri, the likably neurotic author spent day after day in the cafe, reflecting on the notion that he "was unable to produce or even reflect on anything that I or anyone else would consider useful." Seemingly in the throes of a pre-midlife crisis, Rips presents his quirks at face value, sans psychospeak, with hilarious, moving or unsettling effect. In a small, ancient town, one might expect to find citizens repressed by long-standing social mores, an assumption both confirmed and disproved by the many eccentrics: the man who lights his cigarettes with a magnifying glass; an illiterate postman who leaves the villagers to sort their own mail; a blind bootmaker who claims he can make a perfectly sized boot just by looking at a person's foot (he can't, but still keeps his customers); and Pasquale, a terrifying brute with a penchant for smelling feet. Rips warms to Sutri, finding it "an archaic society... that had... forged a collective identity and story and that had a mystical attachment to both." The kindhearted, brutal and idiosyncratic Sutrinis' nonsensical ideas about causality and the author's peculiar, often bleak worldview complement each other perfectly. In tiny, glittering vignettes, Rips paints an extraordinary picture of interwoven sublimity and absurdity.