Florence in Ecstasy
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A young American woman arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But Hannah is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with starvation that has left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food—as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God.
Hannah joins a local rowing club, where Francesca, a welcoming but predatory Milanese, and Luca, a seemingly steady Florentine with whom she becomes involved, draw her into Florence’s vibrant present: the complex social dynamics at the club, soccer mania, eating, drinking, sex, an insatiable insistence on life. But Hannah is also rapt by the city’s past—the countless representations of beauty, the entrenched conflicts of politics and faith, and the lore of the mystical saints, women whose self-imposed isolation and ecstatic searches for meaning through denial illuminate the seduction of her own struggles.
Both sides pull Hannah in: challenging her, defeating her, lifting her up. And when a figure from her past life in Boston reappears, threatening the delicate balance of her present, Hannah’s feverish personal excavation becomes caught up with the long history of women’s contention with body and spirit, desire and death.
A vivid, visceral debut echoing the novels of Jean Rhys, Elena Ferrante, and Catherine Lacey, Florence in Ecstasy gives us an arresting new vision of a woman’s attempt to find meaning—and find herself—in an unstable world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chaffee's debut novel is an unflinching look at a woman's attempt to outrun her demons through an international escape. At 29, Bostonian Hannah is taking an extended hiatus in Florence after losing her job and boyfriend because of an eating disorder she has yet to confront. The prose is both rich and restrained, eschewing the clich of melodrama. In Italy, she finds solace in joining a rowing club, through which she meets and begins a relationship with a man named Luca, and cultivates an obsession with female saints, whose pleasure in pain and emptiness mirrors her relationship with eating. For a time, she is able to enjoy her routine, but her past catches up with her when a former coworker shows up in Florence, prompting a flashback to the incident that got her fired in Boston. She starts to lose control, slipping back into the sharp pleasure of starving herself, pushing her toward a long-overdue personal reckoning. Her intimacy with her disorder is convincingly painted like a dysfunctional romantic relationship, sometimes even like an artist with a dangerous muse ("with every bite I didn't eat, I was creating"). Chaffee treats Hannah's story with both respect and honesty, displaying not only diligent research but also an emotional intuition that brings Hannah to startling life and makes her story quite moving.