Animal Spirit
Stories
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Centered in Rome but transporting us into worlds as varied and alluring as they are emotionally real, Francesca Marciano’s stories paint landscapes that are populated—vividly, hauntingly—by animals: from violent seagulls and starlings circling the evening sky in exhilarating formation to magical snakes and a tiny dog on the side of a deserted road.
In unforgettable, cinematic frames, events unfold, especially in the lives of women. An affair ends painfully at a dinner table, an actress’s past comes crashing down on her during an audition, an unhappy wife seeks respite in a historic palazzo sublet. Two starkly different couples imagine parenthood during a Greek island holiday and a young girl returns from rehab, deciding to set out anew with a traveling circus. A man in crisis draws his ex-lover deep into the New Mexico desert.
With spellbinding clarity, the six masterly stories in Animal Spirit inhabit the minds and hearts of Marciano’s characters. They chronicle deeply human moments of realization and recognition, indelible instants of irrevocable change—epiphanies sometimes sparked by our connection with animals and the primal power they show us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marciano's sharp-eyed and effortlessly graceful collection (after Rules of the Wild), set largely in the author's native Italy, explores the ways people's animalistic instincts drive relationships. In "Terrible Things Could Happen to Us," wealthy family man Sandro falls in love with his yoga teacher, and Marciano's lack of sentimentality keeps things taut until a devastating denouement, which leaves Sandro speechless, "like an actor who has forgotten his lines." In "The Girl," a middle-aged Hungarian tries to convince a young Italian woman to join the circus and help in his snake-charming act. The title story follows two couples sharing an island vacation house as their varying degrees of uncertainty about their futures coalesce around a midnight encounter with a sheep or is it a poodle? that may or may not need to be rescued. In "There Might Be Blood," Diana decamps to Rome to write her long-deferred novel. Rather than writing, she obsesses over seagulls, which plague the city and prevent her from enjoying her terrace near Piazza Navona. Diana decides to enlist Ivo, a falconer, whose birds, Queen and Darko, can hunt the gulls. In this story, and throughout the collection, Marciano skillfully uses her characters' relationships with animals as metaphors to explore their humanity. Polished and compulsively readable, this is a real treat.
