The Bishop's Bedroom
by Piero Chiara
Translated by Jill Foulston
I love it when the time of year in which a novel is set fits the season when I’m reading it. Sometimes, my choice of books is consciously based on this. At others, it’s pure serendipity. This was the case with Piero Chiara’s The Bishop’s Bedroom, Jill Foulston’s translation of Chiara’s 1976 novel “La Stanza del Vescovo”. I picked it up with only a vague idea of it was all about, but then discovered that its action largely takes place over the course of a languorous summer in 1946.
The novel’s unnamed narrator is a well-to-do man – what the Italians call a benestante – who after having escaped the worst of the war by moving to Switzerland, is now spending the summer sailing around Lago Maggiore on his boat, the Tinca. Not having (apparently) any need to work, he literally goes “wherever the wind blows”, berthing at various towns around the lake, and bedding the various women friends he has at each port of call. One day, at Oggebbio, he is befriended by roguish lawyer Temistocle Mario Orimbelli, a veteran of the Italian wars in Africa, and is invited to spend some nights at the lakeside villa owned by Orimbelli’s wife, sleeping in the “Bishop’s bedroom” which gives the novel its title. Unexpectedly, the narrator is drawn into the circle of this ill-assorted family – Orimbelli, cold Cleofe, Matilde (the young widow of Cleofe’s brother, lost during the Ethopian war) and their household servants. A new sailing friend, a comfortable villa to stay at, an enigmatic and attractive woman to conquer – surely life can’t get any better for our narrator! However, things are not what they seem, and by the end of the novel he gets more (or less?) than he bargains for.
This book must have raised a couple of eyebrows when it was published in a still conservative Italy, in view of its underlying thread of sensuality and eroticism, which is even more explicitly brought out in Dino Risi’s 1977 movie adaptation. Featuring Ugo Tognazzi and a young Ornella Muti, Risi’s adaptation included a nude scene which earned it a 14-plus rating from the censors. Today, in the age of #metoo, the novel’s sexual content could well provoke angry reactions for different reasons – I’ve certainly come across a couple of negative reviews expressing disgust at a novel about two men who consider women as mere objects of pleasure.
Such comments
are understandable. The female characters, some of whom remain almost
anonymous, are clearly seen through a concupiscent male gaze, a point which is
clearly underlined through the use of metaphors describing them as “prey”, as “merchandise”
and “meat”. But it would be wrong to
mistake the narrator for the author. I, for one, felt this was not just a “psychological”
novel, as Piero Chiara himself considered it, but also a strongly “moral” one. The Tinca, buffeted around Lago
Maggiore (which, incidentally, is beautifully evoked through spectacular
descriptions of the changing weather and seasons) represents the loss of moral
compass accentuated, if not brought about, by the unprecedented and devastating
events of the war, which seemingly made “traditional morality” redundant. At one point in the novel, the narrator
discusses this with a female friend, who is having an affair with him even
while looking forward to have her husband back from the war. Justifying their behaviour, the narrator then
admits to himself that “this was empty talk. An attempt, for her as well as
me, to adjust to living in the world. Not so much the one that was emerging
after the war, but the world as it always is – bitter and difficult for
everyone, all the time.” The
narrator eventually recognizes in Orimbelli “the embodiment of all the waste
and profligacy [he’d] abandoned [himself] to that year, indeed, a sign
of the waywardness of [his] life, a deviation in its course…” It is this realisation which will guide the narrator’s
decisions at the end of the novel.
A novel to savour on hot, humid August afternoons, a languid evocation of a decadent summer which turns into a captivating mystery/thriller, The Bishop's Bedroom is a must-read whose earthiness and decadence, "wickedness and wantonness" (to paraphrase Christopher Castellanti's blurb) should not be taken at face value.
No comments:
Post a Comment