Haunting, Powerful New Historical Fiction
The title of Daanje's THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER (New Vessel, 562 pp., paperback, $22.95) is loaded with tragic irony. Translated from the Dutch by David McKay, this provocatively labyrinthine novel dissects the consciousness of an amnesiac veteran of World War I who has spent four years in a Belgian asylum only to be retrieved by a woman who insists she is his wife. Against the advice of the friars who have been his custodians, she installs him in her modest apartment, introduces him to their two children and uses her account of his miraculous return to save the nearly bankrupt photography business she has somehow kept going in his absence.
Yet the stories she tells him about their past aren't entirely convincing. Can he trust her? Can he trust himself? Trying to maneuver through a maze of strange new possibilities, he continues to harbor deep doubts and even deeper fears. Is she hiding something from him? Has his mind shut down because of something awful he has done? As interludes of unexpected contentment yield to frightening blackouts, his mental lapses become increasingly frequent and violent, haunted by glimpses of other people and places. Are they hallucinations or are they real memories? This marriage, he comes to realize, 'is built on quicksand, one false step and they'll drown together.'
Florenzer
Leonardo da Vinci is the quintessential Renaissance man, famed for his confident, wide-ranging intellect. Yet in FLORENZER (Liveright, 350 pp., $29.99), Melanson introduces us to a teenage Leonardo still struggling to find himself amid the roiling artistic and political atmosphere of late-15th-century Florence. A talented but feckless apprentice in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, he must learn how to navigate a city where everything seems to be 'a game of pretend.'
For a young man sexually attracted to other young men, this can be particularly dangerous, landing him in prison if he's denounced by a note in one of the boxes kept in church for this very purpose. Yet his work may be his salvation, and for that Melanson provides an intersecting narrative focused on another youthful Florentine. A very different sort of striver, Lorenzo de' Medici operates in a sphere that intermittently overlaps with Leonardo's, as does that of Francesco Salviati, an illegitimate scion of a rival banking family who hopes to rise in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The lives of all three will be changed by the violence that is soon to erupt in what should have been a holy sanctuary. In Florence, apparently nothing is sacred.
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