Another long delay between books and... well, inevitably, I feel out of sorts for it. Not plowing through any particularly lengthy tome -- though I am currently working through a few different books and collections in bits and pieces -- but instead I'm settling back into life at home, after another (glorious) reading vacation in Virginia.
To keep to the road show theme, I just finished David Leavitt's rather tepid Florence, A Delicate Case. This too is part of a larger series -- Bloomsbury's The Writer and the City -- and while not a waste of time it was, at best, well... tepid.
Or rather my reaction was such.
It is a very personal and yet at the same time rather distant accounting of primarily the foreign -- that is English -- presence in Florence. Name-dropping (of names that prove I am not nearly as literate as I should be in the British diaspora of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), extended quotations, and quite a bit of "inside baseball" talk as far as the social machinations of the expatriate community -- and how this was all portrayed in various literary works (of mostly middling quality) -- make up the volume.
Now Leavitt acknowledges as much towards the close of this slight book, but awareness (laudable) does not make the book any more enjoyable. I will, to be sure, move on to the other volumes in the series (have already read and thoroughly enjoyed Edmund White's stroll through Paris) but am not particularly inclined to delve into anything else of Leavitt's.
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