A Very Private Gentleman

Rating:
Summary: Captivation
Review: As a writer I have a intense love for books. I picked this book up at the library. The title interest me only because it contrasted the illustration of the book. When viewing the title I thought it immediately would be a love story. However, I immediately realize that a man was holding a gun and only part of his face could be shown. I begin reading the book. I came to love Mr. Butterfly. He seemed so complicated. At firtst it seems he is content with not having a true identity or noone with whom he can trust. However, the longer he stays in the Italian countryside the longer he realized that he wants something more. He finally got the chanc e to see what life would be like if he just settled. He could paint butterflies, sit at the bar with trustworthy neighbors, have intimate talks with his friend the priest, and fall in love with the beautiful young woman. Though his past and most important one of his "mistakes" ends up threatening his future. I have read too many books and realized how story like this end. What happens to the character. Time again I asked myself why am I still reading this. When I got to the end I realized the answer. Booth's language captivated me. Page by Page I waited for the inevitable yet hoping it would not happen. I loved this book, even in the the last sentence he leaves you wanting more. Not only for the story, but also for the character. I was intrugued by how the character was formed and most importantly his profession. Read this book if you want to know what it means to hunger for literature.

Rating:
Summary: a very good thriller
Review: Come into Signor Farfalla's world as his past comes back to haunt him.
Where beauty & death cohabit quite comfortably.
Where anonymity is tantamount.
Where subterfuge & almost-truths are the language of the day.
Where contacts are made via convoluted means, goods are contracted for large sums of cash, projects are accomplished under cover...& a tranquil bright summer in a charming Italian river valley town is suddenly darkened by the arrival of the shadow-walkers...whose intentions he must fathom.

Rebeccasreads highly recommends A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN as a very good read! Martin Booth's writing is tasty, smooth & piquant, like ripe peaches plucked from the tree; chilled with frissons of suspense, like perfect Italian icecream.

Could not put it down!

Rating:
Summary: a very good thriller
Review: Come into Signor Farfalla's world as his past comes back to haunt him.
Where beauty & death cohabit quite comfortably.
Where anonymity is tantamount.
Where subterfuge & almost-truths are the language of the day.
Where contacts are made via convoluted means, goods are contracted for large sums of cash, projects are accomplished under cover...& a tranquil bright summer in a charming Italian river valley town is suddenly darkened by the arrival of the shadow-walkers...whose intentions he must fathom.

Rebeccasreads highly recommends A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN as a very good read! Martin Booth's writing is tasty, smooth & piquant, like ripe peaches plucked from the tree; chilled with frissons of suspense, like perfect Italian icecream.

Could not put it down!

Rating:
Summary: Macho Nonsense
Review: I am reading a book that is just AWFUL right now. It's oh, i don't know what it's called, I read about it in the NYTimes or something. It's so pretentious. It's about some guy who does such secret work that he won't tell the readers what it is, and he makes it very clear that the lengthy descriptions of places and people in the book are probably not even true at all (in the context of the novel), it's just a ruse, because the guy is too clever to allow anyone as stupid as the reader to ever locate him via such clues. The CIA (or something, maybe it was the World Court, ha ha) almost caught him once, but he narrowly escaped through use of his wits and preparation. Blah, blah, blah. What's the point of THAT, for christ's sake, it's a NOVEL, not an autobiography. If I can't even imagine that the characters or places I'm reading about are real, why should I read about them at all? Besides, if he won't tell us what he does, who the hell cares? So he has something to do with assassinations, or maybe not, I'll never know, and if I'd known any of that before I bought the book, I probably wouldn't have bought it. Maybe I even bought the wrong book! It's based in Italy, which seems to be all that keeps me reading (maybe he'll describe a place I've been, but probably not). It is, basically, macho junk. Also, it literally put me to sleep this afternoon. I think the nap helped my mood though, so thanks, Martin Booth. 3 stars for the nap.

Rating:
Summary: Calming Violence
Review: I found this book intriguing which is a word I believe I read in another review. As someone else said - unlike the raver who said it wasn't an autobiography and shouldn't be written as if it were - it really is the internal state of a man's mind. I disagree about the term "elderly" in yet another review - aging yes but elderly no. I found him very human despite his occupation and felt badly when he couldn't have what he ultimately wanted. I found the writing very gentle and lovely considering Signor Fafalla's job. As a parallel I was reading Sarah Dunant's Mapping the Edge at the same time. As both main characters are trying to get away from someone else, albeit in different ways, sometimes I would expect to find Edmund in the other book as well. It was becoming a surreal experience. I actually recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: A Very Different Book Than I would Have Imagined
Review: I read Lawrence Bloch's Hitman series and I though this would be the European version, but was I wrong! The Bloch books focused in more on the witty comments and action between Keller and his handler.

Booth's book is focused on a previously unknown aspect of a high profile assissination (I won't spoil it for you) that no one really thinks about before.

The main character, Mr. Buttefly, is well written and complex as is the plot. I never could guess where the next chapter would lead, much less the book. The other supporting cast are equally enthralling and layered.

This book reminds of a cross between A Year in Provence and A John LeCarre spy novel.



Rating:
Summary: I couldn't finish it.
Review: I thought highly of two other Martin Booth novels: Industry of Souls and Islands of Silence. Perhaps I wasn't patient enough, but I found Booth in this novel too self consciously trying to create a fascinaing character, whom I found only boring. I am writing this review only because I couldn't find another negative review.

Rating:
Summary: A Suspenseful and Intricate Tale
Review: If Martin Booth's new novel A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN is a bestseller, expect Italy to become a highly popular tourist destination. His narrator, an international criminal, spends the novel alternately enticing you to join him high in the Italian Apennines and cautiously warning you from trying to find him.

The novel's setting, a small, unnamed, rural Italian village, is exquisite and exquisitely rendered. Booth takes time to describe precisely and poetically the old wine shop run by a maniacal dwarf and an obedient giant, the ancient apothecary whose floorboards have absorbed centuries of spills, and the historic piazzas that inspire nothing but nonchalance in the townspeople who visit them every day.

Clarke, which is not the narrator's real name but an alias, poses as a painter of butterflies, a Nabokovian occupation that allows for such eccentricities as long absences, erratic behavior, and no set schedule. So he often lounges and partakes of local delicacies --- the wine, the home-smoked prosciutto, his two mistresses, all of which he describes in tantalizing detail --- while he practices his true calling. Clarke's real profession is much more sinister than painting insects, although equally artistic. He doesn't reveal it until almost 100 pages in, but hints, "I am the salesman of death ... I do not cause it. I merely arrange for its delivery. I am death's booking-clerk, death's bellhop."

Despite his obsession with privacy and death, Clarke is an endlessly entertaining narrator, and his insights into the international underworld and the human condition are intriguing. "Everyone is a terrorist," he observes. "Everyone carries a gun in his heart. Most do not fire simply because they have no cause to pursue."

Booth's rendering of his narrator's voice is remarkable, both for its consistency and for its intricacy. Not only does Clarke keep his guard up through the novel's course, he also manages to convey a great deal about his antihero without him realizing it. Clarke admits his deception to the reader: "The names are changed, the places changed, the people changed. There are a thousand Piazzas di S. Teresa, ten thousand alleys that have no names ... You will not find me."

But Clarke seems unaware of his own self-deception: while he is astute and witty, he can also occasionally be self-important and even boorish in justifying his very private lifestyle. And he studiously avoids cultivating any lasting human connections while wondering how to make his mark on the world, never realizing that to do one is to ensure the other. But his shortcomings become the book's strengths, for as he contemplates life and death in Italy, his flaws --- and his own ignorance of them --- reveal his surprising depth and complex humanity.

Booth makes A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN more than just a postcard from Italy; the setting has direct thematic relevance to the story. History is not just a recurring motif, but a character in itself, an antagonist who constantly reminds Clarke of his encroaching mortality. What better place to set such a face-off than in the seat of Western history, the land where the Knights Templar roamed, where abandoned castles and churches litter the terrain. Even the view from his window captures eras past: "What I can see, with my pair of compact pocket Yashica binoculars, are five thousand years of history laid out before me as if it were a tapestry upon a cathedral wall, an altar-cloth to the god of time spread over the world."

Ultimately, even the passage of time becomes a delicacy in A VERY PRIVATE GENTLEMAN. With a watchmaker's precision, Booth has written a suspenseful and intricate tale, one that is as inviting as it is cautionary.

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

Rating:
Summary: Calming Violence
Review: This is a strangely compelling yarn in that it appeals to the reader's senses while perhaps offending his morality. The protagonist, an elderly man whose career consists of creating highly sophisticated firearms for assassins, is currently living in a small Italian village among the mountains. His warm relationships with the locals and his highly developed appreciation for his surroundings are detailed so well that the reader may experience sensory overload reading descriptions of the wine, the food, the rain, the mountain scenery, the attractions of prostitutes, etc. Reconciling this appreciation of the simple pleasures of life with the cold-bloodedness of a murderer is the trick in appreciating this man. As it turns out, it is his awareness of his surroundings that has enabled our man to slip from one part of the world to another many times, eluding the shadowy people whom he spots trying to tail him and, he assumes, do him in. The ending of the story may be a mild surprise, but there is no socko conclusion.

Rating:
Summary: Effective juxtaposition of evil and beauty
Review: This is a strangely compelling yarn in that it appeals to the reader's senses while perhaps offending his morality. The protagonist, an elderly man whose career consists of creating highly sophisticated firearms for assassins, is currently living in a small Italian village among the mountains. His warm relationships with the locals and his highly developed appreciation for his surroundings are detailed so well that the reader may experience sensory overload reading descriptions of the wine, the food, the rain, the mountain scenery, the attractions of prostitutes, etc. Reconciling this appreciation of the simple pleasures of life with the cold-bloodedness of a murderer is the trick in appreciating this man. As it turns out, it is his awareness of his surroundings that has enabled our man to slip from one part of the world to another many times, eluding the shadowy people whom he spots trying to tail him and, he assumes, do him in. The ending of the story may be a mild surprise, but there is no socko conclusion.