Sicilian Odyssey (National Geographic Directions)

Rating:
Summary: For a Good Time, Don't Call Francine
Review: By Bill Marsano. This is a small book but a large achievement. In less than 40,000 words (about one-third the length of the average novel) Francine Prose commits almost every sin in, as the say, the book. It can't have been easy.

Prose is a novelist of some reputation, chosen probably because the editor thinks novelists are Real Writers who will lend credibility to travel writing, which is, after all, journalism's sandbox. (Also because they know travel books by novelists are routinely over-praised.)

Prose's passion for Sicily is dubious. Although she claims often and unconvincingly that she wishes to be re-born a Sicilian, she has visited but once before--10 years ago. Such devotion is a little on the cool side, is it not?

Does she have some insights to ipart? Indeed, she tells us traffic in Palmermo is 'homicidal'; that Catanians love sweets immoderately; that Sicilian life 'burns at a high heat'; that the Ancient Greeks wouldn't recognize Sicily today; the Sicilian food is not subtle; that Sicilians have a gift for overcoming tragedy that is specifically their own. Her silly comments on the Sicilian aristocracy are at least mildly amusing.

And her writing is both awful and lazy. She writes in the present tense--the lazy way of getting to the bottom of the page, of getting it over with, with a minimum of effort. ("Name" writers love book assignments like this because they pay well, but their work ethic often deserts them. They think they're on vacation.) Like so many other bad travel writers, Prose is short of imagination: She can't get past the first graf without reaching for "magical," the travel hack's favorite word.

She piles up words instead of really writing. For example, when she wants to tell us that 'many pilgrims in a religious procession carry candles' (that's eight words) she says instead that they "carry long yellow candles they will light in the course of their peregrination around the holy sites associated with the saint scattered through the old quarter" (that's twenty-six). What we want from a writer is some electricity in the words, some vigor, some sign of delight in mastery of language. Prose gives us prose, not poetry--drab, bloated, prosaic prose, comma-crippled and tedious.

She uses crutches so often I began counting them. Eternally indecisive, she says 'seems' more than 60 times, occasionally switching to 'perhaps,' 'almost,' 'maybe' and 'a little like.' She finds things 'disturbing' nine times and also leans on 'perilous,' 'upsetting,' 'alarming' and 'spooky.' Well of course: The Real Writer does NOT enjoy herself, especially because she is in Sicily "to discover what this island has learned and can teach us about the triumph of beauty over violence of life over death." (Really?)

Prose often mentions 9/11 as if she were the only one affected by it. She experiences "panic" at an old castle and again while planning to visit Mozia, a tiny island a few yards off the coast: ". . . what if the fisherman who ferries us out there gets distracted and forgets about us, and we're stuck out there all night? What if we're stranded, exposed to the elements, alone with the spirits of the Phoenician traders who first came to Mozia in the eighth century B.C. and who lived in harmony with their Greek neighbors until the Carthaginian wars, when Dionysius the Elder of Syracuse, using catapults, missiles and battering rams--state-of-the-art tools of fourth-century warfare--destroyed the settlement and much of its population?"

What if, indeed. This is drama-queen panic--she's still in her hotel. If stranded, she can just return to the island's museum and tell the attendant. And why on earth would she write or commit such a gross and clumsy sentence to begin with?

Apart from the awful writing, Prose misquotes Goethe and commits numerous grammatical and spelling errors. Everyone connected with this shabby performance should be embarrassed, copy editor included.--Bill Marsano is a professional magazine editor and an award-winning travel writer.

Rating:
Summary: I Can't Recommend This One
Review: I wasn't a particularly great fan of Francine Prose's book, BLUE ANGEL, but there's no doubt she can be a good writer and I am a great fan of Sicily, so I decided the time was right for me to read SICILIAN ODYSSEY. I'm sorry to say, I don't think Prose did a good job of describing Sicily, its culture and its heritage, especially during a period of time when there are far too many travel books around, especially those detailing travels through France and Italy, including Sicily.

SICILIAN ODYSSEY begins with a description of Sicily's very rich mythological past. I already knew some of the things Prose tells us: that Sicily is the island where Odysseus was shipwrecked and rescued by Nausicaa; where Persephone was carried off by Pluto; where Daedalus came to rest after losing Icarus. I didn't know Sicily had been conquered by so many different groups, among them Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Vandals, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Swabians, the Spanish and the French. I did know that the people of Sicily are a highly fatalistic people, able to find joy in the midst of tragedy and now, I think, I know why. Although Prose seems to dip quite deeply into the mythological history of Sicily, she completely ignores its history as a monarchy, something I thought shouldn't have been done because I feel this history has been vital in shaping the emotional lives and outlook of the people of Sicily.

Prose details the towns and villages she visits and she does make an important distinction between the towns on the coast and the towns in the interior. The towns on the coast, she says, are friendly and welcoming, and almost any stranger is willing to tell you the history of the place (not exactly true, though). The towns in the interior are quite different. Although all the people inhabiting a town know one another and one another's history, strangers are suspect, and, Prose says, distinctly unwelcome (not exactly true, either). Prose is making a simplistic generalization here and it really doesn't come off very well. I've known friendly people in the interior of Sicily and unfriendly people in the towns on the coast. I don't think such generalizations are true.

Intensity is the quality that most permeates all of Sicily, Prose says. I can't say that I agree with her. I think fatalism is a far more common trait among Sicilians than is intensity and I think if Prose had detailed a bit more of Sicily's history under the domination of others, she (and her readers) would know why.

Prose warms us of the danger of being "thoroughly beguiled" by Sicily, and she seems to have resisted its bewitching, herself, fairly well. She really hasn't visited Sicily often at all despite her claims of loving it so very much.

There are so many "travel books" around. It seems like every author wants to jump on the "travel book bandwagon." Some of these books (like Peter Mayle's wonderfully comic and insightful A YEAR IN PROVENCE) are very good, but others are just so-so. This is the case with Prose's book. It really isn't terrible, but it really isn't very good, either. It's pretty much the epitome of "so-so."

I can't recommend this book. I would read David Hume's ABOUT SICILY instead.

Rating:
Summary: A concise and insightful view of Sicily
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A concise and insightful view of Sicily
Review: _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 better informed than Lawrence Durrell's entertaining _Sicilian Carousel_, but there are not any characters as vivid in Prose's book as some in the other books I've mentioned.

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.