Bomarzo

<b>“[<i>Bomarzo</i>] is a novel that will make any reader happy.... [A] novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around.” —Roberto Bolaño<br><br>A lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian town’s famously bizarre “Garden of the Monsters.”</b><br><br>Pier Francesco Orsini, duke of Bomarzo, created a park of monsters in which the nightmares of the Renaissance are preserved, set in stone yet still writhingly alive. In <i>Bomarzo</i>, Manuel Mujica Lainez—one of the great Argentine novelists of the twentieth century—re-creates the dark and legendary duke as a brilliant memoirist recalling the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life from a modern point of view (Freudian psychoanalysis and <i>Lolita </i>both put in an appearance) while ensconced in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez’s own Buenos Aires.<br><br><i>Bomarzo </i>is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of an aristocratic hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain (a portrait so convincing that Edmund Wilson assumed it to be fact). It is also, of course, a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it’s an immersive story told in a sumptuous style—a bit as if Proust were rewriting one of Poe’s Italian tales—as Gregory Rabassa’s translation (out of print for many years) conveys beautifully.