'Restoration' has false ring
By David Leavitt |
February 17, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
AMONG the many writers who were part of the early-20th-century English colony in Florence, Iris Origo is probably the best remembered, not just for her wonderful books - they include "The Merchant of Prato," a vivid portrait of daily life in medieval Tuscany - but for La Foce, the run-down property she and her husband transformed into a self-sufficient community incorporating 57 farms, a school and a hospital. During World War II, Origo stuck it out at La Foce, where she sheltered refugee children and hid partisans from the Germans. Her diary of those years forms the basis for her best, most enduring work, "War in Val d'Orcia."
Origo's life is the springboard for Olaf Olafsson's new novel, "Restoration," which takes place during the war years, partly on a Val d'Orcia farm called San Martino, and has as its heroine an Englishwoman named Alice Orsini.
Of the novel's two dovetailing plots, one is ingenious and preposterous, the other plodding and insipid. Neither does justice to the book that inspired them.
At the center of the more promising plot is an act of forgery. It is the early 1940s, and Kristin Jonsdottir, a young Icelandic painter, is living in Rome, where she serves as both apprentice and lover to Robert Marshall, a famed restorer of, and dealer in, Italian Renaissance masterworks. Very quickly, Kristin learns that she has a gift for restoration, in particular the "repainting" of those portions of a picture that have been damaged beyond recognition. She considers the married Marshall to be her "master," yet as the war intensifies it gradually dawns on her that he is not about to leave his pregnant wife. She also learns he is selling the paintings she has restored to the Nazis and her reverence turns into contempt.
Embarking on an audacious course of revenge, Kristin uses a heavily damaged but minor painting as her template and "creates" what she will present as a hitherto undiscovered Caravaggio, a "Portrait of a Young Woman" for whom she herself is the model, larded with visual clues hinting at its fraudulence. Her idea is to arrange for Marshall to stumble upon the painting, identify it and sell it, thus providing her with the means to ruin him. No sooner has she put her plan into action, however, than she has second thoughts.
"Restoration" is a mixed bag. Passages of haunting elegance (particularly in the evocation of Kristin's childhood) alternate with episodes of awful sentimentality.
The most troubling - and interesting - problem "Restoration" addresses is the relationship between a work of art and the source material on which it draws.
Origo's life is the springboard for Olaf Olafsson's new novel, "Restoration," which takes place during the war years, partly on a Val d'Orcia farm called San Martino, and has as its heroine an Englishwoman named Alice Orsini.
Of the novel's two dovetailing plots, one is ingenious and preposterous, the other plodding and insipid. Neither does justice to the book that inspired them.
At the center of the more promising plot is an act of forgery. It is the early 1940s, and Kristin Jonsdottir, a young Icelandic painter, is living in Rome, where she serves as both apprentice and lover to Robert Marshall, a famed restorer of, and dealer in, Italian Renaissance masterworks. Very quickly, Kristin learns that she has a gift for restoration, in particular the "repainting" of those portions of a picture that have been damaged beyond recognition. She considers the married Marshall to be her "master," yet as the war intensifies it gradually dawns on her that he is not about to leave his pregnant wife. She also learns he is selling the paintings she has restored to the Nazis and her reverence turns into contempt.
Embarking on an audacious course of revenge, Kristin uses a heavily damaged but minor painting as her template and "creates" what she will present as a hitherto undiscovered Caravaggio, a "Portrait of a Young Woman" for whom she herself is the model, larded with visual clues hinting at its fraudulence. Her idea is to arrange for Marshall to stumble upon the painting, identify it and sell it, thus providing her with the means to ruin him. No sooner has she put her plan into action, however, than she has second thoughts.
"Restoration" is a mixed bag. Passages of haunting elegance (particularly in the evocation of Kristin's childhood) alternate with episodes of awful sentimentality.
The most troubling - and interesting - problem "Restoration" addresses is the relationship between a work of art and the source material on which it draws.
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