Sicilian Odyssey

By Francine Prose

Book Overview

A blending of art and cultural criticism, travel writing, and personal narrative, Sicilian Odyssey is Francine Prose's imaginative consideration of the diverse cultural legacies found juxtaposed and entangled on the Mediterranean island of Sicily. She writes of the intensity of Sicily, the commitment to the extreme, where the history is more colorful, the sun hotter, the cooking earthier, the violence more horrific, the carnival more raucous, the politics more Byzantine than other places on Earth, and how much the island can teach us about the triumph of beauty over violence and life over death.Prose examines architectural sites and objects and looks at the ways in which myth and actuality converge. Exploring the intact and beautiful Greek amphitheaters at Siracusa and Taormina, the cathedral at Monreale, the Roman mosaics at Piazza Armerina, and some of the masterpieces of the Baroque scattered throughout the island, Prose focuses her keen insight to imagine them in their own time, to examine the evolution and decline of the cultures that produced them, and to deconstruct powerful responses each evokes in her.Illuminated by the author's own photographs, Sicilian Odyssey brings exotic and enigmatic Sicily to life through the prism of its past.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0792265351
• ISBN13: 9780792265351
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: National Geographic Society
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A concise and insightful view of Sicily

Novelist Francine Prose's slim but not slight book is filled with insights and evocative appreciation of the often-invaded island of Sicily and its hybrid art and cuisine. Her book provides a good introduction to Sicily, and also provides many interesting reflections for those who have visited the island and are familiar with the literature about it. _Sicilian Odyssey_ lacks the familiarity based on long-time residence underlying Peter Robb's involuted and near-desparing _Midnight in Sicily_ , Daphne Phelps's The Most Beautiful House in Sicily, or Mary Taylor Simeti's _On Persephone's Island_. Prose's travel book is, however, much better informed than Lawrence Durrell's entertaining _Sicilian Carousel_, but there are not any characters as vivid in Prose's book as some of those in the other books I've mentioned. I think that Prose's book is a useful introduction to Sicily that also contains much of interest to those with previous experience of Sicily and the writings about it in English. She writes acutely about food (rightly summing up that "if freshness [of ingredients] is the hallmark of Sicilian cuisine, subtlety is not").and art and architecture, with insightful bits of appreciation of Sicilian writers and photographers and of what Caravaggio did while on Sicily. Also, her photographs (reproduced in black-and-white) are sharp and well illustrate some of the points in her text.