![]() The book is clearly very committed to the richness and authenticity of its setting, which includes a similar commitment to what might loosely be termed historically accurate attitudes. Its got a kind of inherent queerness, because of the nature of the cast, although I don’t know how I felt a lot of the time about how that queerness was realised, especially when it intersected with race. Which kind of works? And also doesn’t? Creating something that is full of atmosphere, (self-consciously?) low on coherence. The book is probably best described as a picaresque carousel (is that a totally mixed metaphor?), swirling from Italy to America, from year to year, and character to character. In any case our hero … protagonist? Is Raffi Peach, an Italian shipped off to American to essential hide him after a wayward priest, you know, mutilated him to preserve his voice. It was the setting of this one that caught my fancy, since I’m vaguely aware the Parker House Hotel was a real thing in Boston during the 1920s. Err, I read it because, having read exactly one history book about a single castrato, Amazon is now like SO YOU LIKE CASTRATO HUH HERE ARE NOTHING BUT BOOKS ABOUT CASTRATI. I genuinely don’t know what to make of this. ![]()
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