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-   -   Amanda Prantera (https://palimpsest.org.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=1706)

John Self 18th Jan 2006 12:15

Amanda Prantera
 
I'm currently enjoying Amanda Prantera's 1996 novel Zoe Trope (a sequel of sorts to her earlier novel, Proto Zoe: yes, the woman should really be called Amanda Pun-terror), and as I expect she's a name not many are familiar with, to fill in the gaps let me append my Amazon review of her last-but-one novel Capri File (2001). This may go some way to explaining why the first few chapters of Zoe Trope have caused the greatest shaking yet of my so-far intact book buying ban. She really is awfully good...

Quote:

Amanda Prantera's not exactly a big name these days but I was semi-familiar with her when I saw Capri File, read the first few pages and had to buy it to read on. I am sure I used to have a couple of her books culled from a secondhand shop in the early 90s: I remember being attracted by her originality and ear for a title (Strangeloop, The Cabalist, and who can forget the now legendary Conversations With Lord Byron On Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordship's Death?). I think I had the first two of these but never read them; either they fell into that small category of books which passes through my hands from bookshop to charity shop without ever catching on my brain, or they're still at the bottom of a storage box somewhere, crushed and petrified under strata of more recent books, and providing essential fossil fuels for future generations.


So anyhow. I had never heard of Capri File but her name made me open it, and I was quite gripped by the first pages, which took the form of healthily realistic-sounding emails from Lola Salvia d'Acquaviva, a woman living on the island of Capri, to an online book-search service, seeking some titles to help her research a new novel. I delighted in the combination in her email voice of literary learning and pun-obsessed whimsy. Just the sort of emails I like to receive...

So I took it home and devoured it. The email correspondence is one-way, so although Lola and the booksearcher Simon strike up an easy friendship, we only ever hear her side of the conversation. This has of course been done before in more traditional epistolatory form, though it's a technique which lends itself more to the short story, for people abandoned and plaintively crying out for a response from their beloved. In Capri File (the title by now a bit of a crashing bore of a pun), though, there is another side to the story; we just don't hear it. Prantera manages to pull this off without making Lola recap all the contents of Simon's last email at the start of each of hers, and gives the reader the right to do a bit of work on filling in the blanks themselves.

The plot - for this, and don't tell the great and good world of Eng. Lit., is a novel with a story that really does drag you on, virtually a real-life Thriller in its breathless way at times - deepens quite quickly as Lola's research into the history of one or two of Capri's exiles continues, and takes in adultery, family shame, murder and most of all paedophilia. But although Capri File is a damn fine entertainment, it also excels in its structural cleverness and subtle brushing of issues like the ease (and all we netheads nod solemnly) with which one can become unrealistically intimate so quickly with a complete stranger thousands of miles away while simultaneously becoming alienated from one's quotidian nearest and dearest; and the ease with which these messages, made in haste but read at leisure, can be misinterpreted and at what human cost. It even has a plot where the tin hat is not put on until the very very lastest page.
Sadly most of Amanda Prantera's other ten novels are out of print, so treat yourself to the charms of Capri File (ignoring the hideous cover) and if we can create a groundswell of demand, maybe someone will put her backlist back between covers where it belongs. Particularly that one about Byron and perversion. Dammit, that's a book I want to be a part of.
And here is her fictional output so far, all novels, though the Zoe ones tread the line with lots of short almost discrete anecdotes.
  • Strange Loop (1984): "strikingly original, a delight from start to finish" - Evening Standard
  • The Cabalist (1985): "an eerie, original talent. Read on, entranced" - Guardian
  • Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years After His Lordship's Death (1986)
  • The Side of the Moon (1991)
  • Proto Zoe (1992): "short, witty, tricky and apposite" - Independent
  • The Young Italians (1993): "A wonderfully cool tale of adultery, passion and foreplay" - Observer
  • The Kingdom of Fanes (1995)
  • Zoe Trope (1996): "irresistible ... belies the weight of the substantial talent which produced it" - The Times
  • Letter to Lorenzo (1999): "An elegant novel, part thriller, part romance" - Sunday Times
  • Don Giovanna (2000): "a world rich in farce, double-meanings and humour ... delightful" - Glasgow Herald
  • Capri File (2001): "a smart, readable tale" - Daily Mail
  • Spoiler (2003): "A Da Vinci Code for grown-ups" - Mail on Sunday

John Self 18th Jan 2006 17:27

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
So, Zoe Trope was a breeze of a read, though with an ending rather suddener than I was expecting. It's a conversational account of the various loves in Zoe's adult life (just as I understand its predecessor Proto Zoe covered her childhood) - mostly men, but also places and friends and philosophies. The first of these was her father, and the opening chapters give us a sizzling portrait of family angst, with the mixed feelings that follow Zoe's grandmother's funeral, and a superbly done example of the wars of words that passed for conversation between father and gran:

Quote:

'When will you realise you are breaking my heart with this life you lead?'

'Your heart? You haven't got a heart, you've got an octopus lodged in your chest, that's what you've got. Suck, suck, cling, cling, bind, bind.'

'Why do you talk if it is only to wound me?'

'I talk because there's nothing else to do in this mausoleum of a house.'

'Ah! But this mausoleum is a convenient place to park your child, isn't it? Isn't it? While you and your wife go gadding about to parties and race meetings and goodness knows what, behaving like children yourselves. When will you grow up, the pair of you, I would like to know? When will you learn to shoulder your own burdens?'

'I never knew you looked on Zoe as a burden, but if that's the way you feel, the answer's simple. She will come straight back home with me today and never again set foot in this godforsaken place.' (To me, but not with sufficient conviction to move me from my chair.) 'Go and pack your things, Zo, we're not wanted here, we're off.'

'Ah!' (But with a different emphasis this time, the 'a' much longer, making it sound more like a sob.) 'You would do that to me? Deprive me of the child in order to spite me? You know, I truly believe you would, however much it might interfere with your trips to Deauville and Monte Carlo. But I'm not going to allow it. My duty to Zoe comes first. I may have failed over your upbringing, but I am not going to fail over hers, oh, no, no, no.'

'Duty? You call it duty? I call it blackmail and lust for power. Incredible, under that flawless exterior, what a wicked old woman you are. No wonder your husband chose to live in a different continent. I would do the same if I could afford it.'
And so on. But what really excels is that after this impressionistic series of sketches - Jeremy followed by Adrian followed by Neri followed by Michael - we feel we know Zoe like a real person, all through accounts of her relations with other people. This time there's not so much plot, but the writing sings as ever and as with Capri File, Prantera has an ability to slip in the most elegant slivers of erudition without slowing down the flow.

Incidentally, since posting the review of Capri File, I now see that most of Prantera's novels (with the exception of The Side of the Moon, The Kingdom of Fanes and, yes, the Lord Byron on Perversion one) are available in paperback from Bloomsbury. Hurray for that - the Anglo-Italian renaissance starts here.

John Self 31st Jan 2006 18:52

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
I've decided to work my way through Amanda Prantera's back catalogue (with no reference to how I came upon them, book-buying-embargo still technically in place and all that) and have now begun her first novel Strange Loop (1984).

Meanwhile I see on her agent's site, reference to a new novel due to be published in July 2005, which has presumably been put back, called Sabine:

Quote:

Viola, a precocious teenage vixen, has been sent off to finish her schooling at a crumbling French chateau. Her education consists of masked balls at the neighbouring chateaux, flirting with the young French aristocrats and smoking too many Gitanes. Then Sabine, the new teacher arrives and Viola gets a completely different schooling. Sabine is spiky and provocative and loathes her languid charges, especially the insolent Viola. But hostility quickly turns to passion and soon teacher and student succumb to their deepest, most secret desires. Their affair, though, is a threat to everyone around them. For there are dark forces at play at the chateau and a dangerous secret which must be uncovered. Viola must fight with everything she has in order to protect her lover. Arch, gothic and scandalous, Sabine will shock, titillate and thoroughly entertain.
Girl-on-girl action! When's it coming out??

John Self 31st Jan 2006 19:03

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
D'oh! I see, with a moment's more searching, that Sabine has already been published: but presumably with an effort to attract interest in it (and by extension in Prantera and her other work), and not realising that this method has been done to death in recent years, Bloomsbury have published it 'anonymously,' under the name A.P.



"A.P. dares not reveal her name, having revealed so much else in her hair-raising text, Sabine. She was born in England but educated mainly in France." :roll:

Stewart 31st Jan 2006 19:51

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
Watch out for some lusty fairy action by anonymous author, S.W.

amner 31st Jan 2006 20:56

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
Well, having ignored Richard Yates and Patrick McGrath thus far I can only say, re Amanda Prantera...count me in!

John Self 1st Feb 2006 22:19

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
Strange Loop (1984) was Amanda Prantera's first novel and I'm glad now that I never got around to reading it when I first picked up a copy all those years ago, as I might not have been persuaded to sample her further. It's not immature exactly - she was 42 when it was published - but it does fairly lack the accessibility and playfulness of her later stuff from the 90s and 00s (er, based on the one of each I've read, Zoe Trope and Capri File). The first person narrative is over-written, perhaps consciously as our protagonist is a philosopher - or considers himself one anyway - but it does cloud the story and give the impression of padding (after which it stretches only to 165 pages anyway). The plot has our man, Ludwig, returning to an abbey where he worked as a young man in the library after the second world war. He reminisces on his obsession with what he believes is a young woman trapped high in the turret opposite, and much passion and tragedy ensues. The framing device of Ludwig returning to the abbey is artificial and adds little to the story (other than a frisson from a gravestone), and the central dramatic plot point, laboriously led up to, is obvious from about halfway through, even when Prantera tries to deflect this by having her narrator explicitly acknowledge (and wrongly dismiss) the idea.

In its finer moments Strange Loop does have that heady combination of erudition and storytelling that someone like Andrew Crumey does so well, but only in moments, and for the most part it's an apprentice work for completists - like me! - only.

***00

John Self 5th Feb 2006 21:55

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
Amanda Prantera's second novel, The Cabalist (1985), begins much more interestingly than Strange Loop, with the author interrupting in alternating chapters to give us a bit of background on the protagonist: stepping behind the curtain, so to speak. The protagonist is Kestler, a Venetian magician - as opposed to illusionist - who is terminally ill and wants to sort out his affairs and secure a worthy successor to his work before he dies. He also wants to combat a malevolent child demon called the Catcher (or Catfisher), who lures cats to their deaths, and who may or may not be real...

Unfortunately the author disappears quickly and we are left with an unforgivably dull read. Kestler's page-long paragraphs of internal monologue are dense and dreary and show clearly that while Prantera - a philosophy graduate - was eager to impress with her erudition and ability to sustain long stretches of unbroken prose, she had yet to come to the realisation that her true strength was in effortless readability and faux-naive cunning. This book has none of that, so goes down as another How-did-she-ever-get-a-deal-for-another-one? volume, although I'm glad in the end that she did.

**000

John Self 13th Feb 2006 12:38

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
Going from Amanda Prantera's second novel to her last-but-one novel Spoiler (2003), shows starkly how her style has changed - and to my eye improved - in the intervening twenty years. Spoiler is much in the line of Capri File, with its playful, charming narrator, this time a young man named Ben, a noviciate priest in a seminary in Rome. The subtitle of the novel is According to the Book of Ben, which both underlines the biblical references in which the book is steeped, and reminds us of the fallibility of the first person narrator. Pleasingly, though - and I never thought I'd say this - Ben is not simply an unreliable narrator, and doubts are cast on his testament openly from the start, and the ending is satisfyingly ambiguous, reminding us that as far as evil goes, the worst horror of all isn't knowing, but not knowing.

Ben has come to a Foucault's Pendulum style conspiracy theory: he believes someone in the seminary has killed a baby born on 25 December 2000 because they believe that the antichrist was born on that day, and had to kill him on the following lunar eclipse. Ben's next-door-roommate Adam (to whom Ben looked up in a more homoerotic than saintly way) has already been pushed off a high tower for his knowledge of this, and Ben is trying to piece together the clues he left before he died. So the setting is as clichéd as you like, but the handling is not, which is presumably why this 2003 novel of religious conspiracy, secret sects and murder failed sales-wise, and why The Da Vinci Code did not. Prantera can never leave her learning off the page for long, though unlike The Cabalist or Strange Loop, here it is used to entertaining and gripping effect, and her love of puns and fragmented formatting make the book as much a pleasure as The Cabalist was a relentless-paragraphed drag.

As a first-class entertainment, but an entertainment nonetheless, I give it a ***00 and a smile.

John Self 19th Mar 2006 21:43

Re: Amanda Prantera
 
I read the prequel (I suppose) to Zoe Trope, Proto Zoe this weekend. It takes us through a series of incidents in Zoe's early life, involving wicked (in a good way) grandmothers, finishing schools, first loves and so on, all fairly amusing and ultimately rather more disposable and less memorably written than its sequel. I can't help thinking that at 140 pages each, the two Zoe volumes could profitably be combined into one without straining readers' wrists. I must admit that for all my early enthusiasm for Prantera, none of the four books of hers that I've read since Capri File has matched up to that early delight, and I face the pile of seven still to go on my bookshelf - Conversations with Lord Byron..., The Side of the Moon, The Young Italians, The Kingdom of Fanes, Letter to Lorenzo, Don Giovanna and Sabine, with rather less excitement now than I did before. But I shall work my way through them anyway if it takes me all year. I do it all for you, you know.


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