Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION OLA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION OLA | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"A tremendous talent."
--Boston Globe
"Restoration is an elegantly constructed work of fiction, seamlessly moving between the past and the present."
--Ron Rash, bestselling author of Serena
Acclaimed novelist Olaf Olafsson brings us Restoration, a sweeping story of love tested by human frailty and the terrors and tragedies of war. Departing from the landscapes of his native Iceland--so beautifully evoked in Absolution, The Journey Home, and other previous works--Olafson sets Restoration in the gorgeous Italian hills of Tuscany during the World War Two years of the early 1940s. He captivates readers with a deeply emotional story in the vein of The English Patient by Michael Ondaajte, Ian McEwan's Atonement, and other contemporary literary classics, spinning a tale of passion, art, war, and betrayal centered around a pair of love triangles and a forged Caravaggio.
Author Notes
Olaf Olafsson is vice chairman of Time Warner Digital Media. He is the author of a previous novel, Absolution.
He lives in New York City.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
There's a lot going on in Olafsson's fourth novel: it's 1944, the Allies are advancing, the Germans retreating, and the front line is moving closer to San Martino, the Tuscan estate that English-born Alice Orsini and her Italian husband have restored. But that's not all: Alice has a guilty conscience and a dead son; her husband has disappeared; a mysterious painting is buried on her property; and she and her staff are running an orphanage and health clinic. The arrival of an Icelandic painter and art restorer should set the stage for fireworks, but doesn't. Despite many possibilities for drama, Olafsson's book falls flat. Alice brings her husband up to date via her diary entries, and an omniscient narrator informs us of everything else, none of it with much flair. The prose is rooted in exposition and explanation, and cliches abound. Olafsson, an executive v-p at Time Warner, based Alice on Iris Origo, an aristocratic Englishwoman married to an Italian whose account of staving off the Germans while sheltering orphans and Allied soldiers at her Tuscan villa was published as War in Val D'Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944. By the time the fighting heats up and the plot strands all coalesce, the stake that readers should have in the fates of these characters just isn't there. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In the summer of 1944, in Tuscany, the lives of two women, both with damaging clandestine love affairs behind them, intersect. British-born Alice, whose marriage to Marchese Claudio Orsini palls after the excitement of restoring their rundown country estate, named San Martino, embarks on a long-term affair with a childhood friend, whose comfort she seeks as her young son, Giovanni, dies of meningitis. Claudio, unable to comprehend Alice's absence from their dying son's bedside, vanishes, leaving Alice to manage the estate as the German occupying forces approach. Art student Kristin, who falls in love, in Rome, with her married mentor and employer, art expert and restorer Robert Marshall, executes the perfect postaffair artistic revenge, which ultimately takes her to San Martino, which now shelters partisans, escaped Allied prisoners of war, and more. With a backdrop of the ravages of WWII, particularly as they affect the civilian population, Olafsson casts a keen eye on Germany's wartime acquisition of artistic masterpieces. A beautifully written literary novel of love, betrayal, reconciliation, and art.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
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 and it gradually dawns on her that he is not about to leave his pregnant wife and, furthermore, that he is selling the paintings she has restored to the Nazis, 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. Further complicating matters, Marshall has already handed the painting over to the Germans, who have arranged for it to be hidden for the duration of the war in an underground vault on the property of Alice Orsini, whom Marshall has been threatening with blackmail. And here is the second plot of "Restoration." Raised in the fishbowl of AngloAmerican Florence, Alice has managed to escape by marrying Claudio Orsini, with whom she has moved to Val d'Orcia and had a son, Giovanni. Unfortunately, life on the farm has proved less satisfying than Alice had hoped, and in her frustration she has entered into an affair with a childhood friend, Connor MacKenzie, about which Robert Marshall has gotten wind. While she is off with her lover, Giovanni dies of meningitis, filling her with a guilt Marshall is only too eager to put to his own use, compelling her to safeguard the putative Caravaggio. What neither of them knows is that Kristin is on her way to San Martino to find - and attempt to destroy - her own forgery. "Restoration" is a mixed bag. Passages of haunting elegance (particularly in the evocation of Kristin's Icelandic childhood) alternate with episodes of cringe-inducing sentimentality (Olafsson's account of Giovanni's death). Then there are the diary entries that punctuate the third-person narrative, addressed by Alice to her husband. She keeps this journal hidden, we are told, under a loose tile in her bedroom until the threat of its discovery by the Germans impels her to bury it by her son's grave. Yet this decision Alice explains to her husband ... in a diary entry. More problematic is Alice herself. She is, as Ford Madox Ford had it, "a personality of paper." She represents "a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold." The collapse of Alice's marriage is the collapse of a marriage between banknotes ("What had happened to us? Why had we drifted so far apart?"), while her affair with Connor is an affair between bank-notes ("I hope you don't mind me saying so, but you're more beautiful than ever"). In contrast, Kristin's affair with Marshall prickles with uneasy life, especially in those postcoital moments when they talk about art "It's essential to know your own limitations," he tells her early on, "and be satisfied with your lot - whatever that is, because no job is without value. We're all guided by providence." For Marshall, stifling Kristin's aspiration to be a painter is essential: he needs her too badly as a restorer, something he doesn't dare admit lest he lose his power over her. Yet he consistently underestimates her. By far the most troubling - and interesting - problem "Restoration" addresses is the relationship between a work of art and the source material on which it draws. This relationship is explored both inside and outside the novel, in its account of the extraordinary fate of Kristin's Caravaggio and in Olafsson's ambivalent acknowledgments. Full disclosure: In 1993, I was sued by the poet Stephen Spender after I wrote a novel, "While England Sleeps," based on an episode from his memoir "World Within World." If I learned anything from that unhappy experience, it was that it's essential for writers to acknowledge their sources fully and without hedging. The difficulty here is that while Olafsson acknowledges, he also hedges. "While Alice Orsini undoubtedly shares similarities with Iris Origo," he writes, "it is important to stress that the former is a purely fictional construct. The same applies to other characters and historical figures. They may share their names or certain features with characters in the book, but that's where the similarities end." Such a statement invites the curious reader to investigate for himself. Like Alice, Iris grew up in Florence. Like Alice, she married an Italian and restored a farm in Val d'Orcia. Like Alice, she had an affair with a friend of her youth and lost her young son to meningitis. (Origo doesn't seem to have been with her lover, as Alice is, when her child died, although Origo's biographer, Caroline Moorehead, speculates that at the child's funeral, she might have "thought of her long affair with Colin, and wondered whether this was not a punishment for her happiness.") OLAFSSON'S minimizing of the obvious debt he owes Origo is so disingenuous that it leaves me wondering whether "Restoration" might be a fantastic joke about authorship and authority, authenticity and authentication. Kristin, for instance, is continually troubled by a teacher's praise of her technical skills - which seems to imply the absence of something else, a "capacity for originality." For her, such praise comes like "a blow." Yet is originality really a necessary prerequisite for making art? The question is still bothering Kristin at the novel's end when, decades later, we discover that she has not only pulled a fast one on Marshall and the Germans but on the experts at the National Gallery - and, perhaps, herself. Iris Origo's memoir 'War in Val d'Orcia' is the springboard for Olaf Olafsson's new novel. David Leavitt is co-director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Florida.
Kirkus Review
(Valentines, 2007, etc.), a top executive at Time Warner. "Nothing had happened yet, but she knew it was going to happen and she was sure that he knew too," reflects a pivotal character on the verge of an affair. And so it happens. At least twice. The intersecting plotlines of two different affairs--and the relationship sparked between two women of different generations and nationalities--provide the complications which this novel resolves in a manner that may not satisfy readers devoted to the genre of historical romance. The title also has multiple references. Toward the end of World War II, a young British woman from a wealthy family, living in Italy, marries an Italian landowner whom her family rejects as beneath her. While searching for a place to settle, she discovers a Tuscan villa in dire need of repair, deemed uninhabitable, and she and her husband begin to restore it. She subsequently has a baby and an affair, and soon it's her crumbling marriage that is in need of restoration. Meanwhile, a young apprentice painter from Iceland finds work restoring classic canvases from earlier centuries, which the sinister art dealer with whom she's having an affair sells to the Germans. Ultimately, both women as well as a painting of questionable origin come together at the restored Tuscan villa, which has become something of a haven for children and others escaping the war. Divided loyalties, political and marital, result in "problems [that are] trivial in the scheme of things. We can see now that the world lies in ruins." The world doesn't end, though pivotal relationships might. Though there are some quasi-literary flourishes here, the interior lives of the characters rarely rise above melodramatic clich. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Much of Olafsson's fiction (Valentines; Absolution; Walking into the Night) focuses on lives shattered by doomed love affairs, and in this beautifully realized novel of love and betrayal in Tuscany and Rome during the closing months of World War II, he maintains that focus to powerful effect. At its center are two intelligent women whose lives become tragically intertwined during the war. Alice Orsini, an affluent Englishwoman married to the son of an Italian landowner, recklessly begins an affair with a childhood friend. Kristin Jonsdottir, who shows up injured on Alice's property, is a young, impressionable art student in love with a powerful art dealer who's selling Italian masterpieces to the Nazis. Both women have knowledge of a valuable Caravaggio painting being sought by high-ranking officers in the Allied and the German armies. And both are ruined not by the war but by destructive love affairs. VERDICT Olafsson masterfully portrays the interior lives of these women, creating a richly complex portrait of love and passion at work even as his harrowing depictions of daily life in war-torn Italy add additional depth and power to the novel. Enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary and historical fiction.-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.