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Summary: Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town
Review: An attorney makes his literary debut with a slim collection of musings on a year's residence in Italy. The format will be familiar to anyone having even a passing acquaintance with Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. An American family-in this case, ex-trial lawyer Michael, wife Sheila, and their baby daughter-moves to a European village and has an intriguing time learning about life from the quirky but warm inhabitants. Preciousness is a pitfall of this genre, but the author gives good promise of avoiding it in his opening pages, where he declares that "The plan was that Sheila would spend her days painting, while I would sit and reflect on the fact that I'd not worked for years, had an infant daughter, and was unable to produce or even reflect on anything that I or anyone else would consider useful." Unfortunately, from here Rips swings his gaze outward and relates a series of anecdotes about the inhabitants of the town of Sutri: a blind bootmaker, a crusty bean farmer, a hermaphroditic shopkeeper. The locals seem to be little more than collections of traits; their motivations and relationships remain opaque. More promising is the author's own story: an adulthood spent living in hotels, his relationships with his wife and daughter. Unfortunately, he does little with these topics, telling just enough to intrigue the reader and then retreating to yet another sketch of local qualities and customs. Rips makes motions towards a larger unifying theme, mentioning philosophy or the Bible or his curiosity about the meaning of life, but he never addresses these subjects in a sustained way. Taken as a whole, his effort falls flat. Colorful but slight.
Rating:
Summary: Good to the last drop of espresso ...
Review: As one of the many who has fallen in lust with Italy over a too-short visit, I found this a fun read. The author displays a whacked-out sense of humor as he deconstructs the citizenry of a small town (large village?) north of Rome. There seems to be an unusually large number of eccentrics inside those ancient walls, and one more - in the person of Rips - just adds to the brew. He seems out of his element in the beginning, but eventually you start to think he's landed exactly where he belongs, in a sort of beign asylum where the inmates are the admissions committee. The dry commentary reminded me of the great Ludwig Bemelmens, one of the 20th century's premier travel essayists, though sadly largely forgotten today. Maybe you've read D.H.Lawrence's accounts of travel in Italia - infuse an offbeat sense of humor and a semi-fictional tone and you'll come away with a copy of Pasquale's Nose. If you don't get to go to Italy yourself this year - or, better yet, if you do - this may be the perfect vacation read.
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Summary: Mythmaking at it's best.....
Review: Does Pasquale have a keen sense of smell because his nose is big or because the ratio of his nostrils to his nose is proportionately larger than that of other men. Can you really skin a porcupine by slitting the skin covering one of his footpads and blowing into the resulting hole until the beast inflates? And what about the appearance of Dante's Beatrice in the middle of the central piazza of Sutri? PASQUALE'S NOSE is mystifying, funny, enlightening, existential and religious. Each of the "local" residents in the "Very Ancient City of Sutri" outside Rome has a story. There are plenty of secrets too. Rips is a storyteller who has collected, recorded, and repeats the tales he hears and the events he witnesses in this amusing, horrifying, and rustic little town. In Sutri, horses run in races without riders, local contadini own the palazzo, and old men shift around the piazza with the sun. Sutri may have been built by the Etruscans, nobody knows. Charlemange may have visited, but the details are messy. Pontius Pilot may have been a native, but no one is admitting it. There are plenty of versions about how Sutri got it's start, but they conflict. Truth is relative in Sutri. I don't know if Rips speaks Italian or not. He says the Sutris will not talk to you if you don't speak Italian. So, either he speaks Italian, or someone else did and told him what he heard, or he manufactured the tale. Maybe PASQUALE'S NOSE is take-off on all the stories in print about ex-patriate life in Italy, or France, or Poland. Rips says he is a non-non-person. I read PASQUALE'S NOSE in six hours. Since the paperback is light as a feather, you can take it along on your next flight to Italy. When you arrive, you can check out Sutri yourself and discover the truth.
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Summary: The place is for real...
Review: Having read and greatly enjoyed this story, I later found myself at Sutri enroute from Rome to Tuscany. My wife and I stopped to stretch our legs and see the town. It is as described, and so are the people. When Michael's name and/or book were mentioned, most people rolled their eyes (lovingly). This book made a visit to Sutri infinitely more enjoyable, and made it a special place among places on the Via Cassia (SS2).
Rating: 
Summary: I Can't Believe It's Not Fiction
Review: I enjoyed this book immensely. Michael Rips moves with his wife and daughter to Sutri, a town in Tuscany close to Rome, and discovers one of the oddest cast of characters imaginable. I suspect that Rips has a penchant for the odd and grotesque; still, I don't think he was inventing the aristocrat with a cat's paw for a hand, the old men with fond memories of POW camps in America, the restauranteur who refuses to serve dessert, or any of the other strange figures who populate this memoir of life in an Italian town. ...[The] book is a deeply welcome change from the ecstatic, sun-soaked memoirs typical of the genre. It also has a much more refined sense of history and sociology; Rips makes valient efforts to understand the unconventional mentality of the inhabitants of Sutri, all of whom attribute their marked clannishness to an Etruscan heritage (incorrectly, as it turns out.) This book was at once more realistic, and more fantastic than the average travelogue, almost like a fairy tale in the whimsicality of the stories it spun. My only quibble with the book is that Rips, a first-time author, didn't tell us enough about himself or what he was doing in Italy for me to really care about him or his family. The book has no sense of narrative; it's more a collection of sketches of his neighbors. I actually didn't realize Rips was an attorney until I read about it on Amazon; he portrays himself as a good-for-nothing layabout with no skills. A more honest account of himself, his family, and what they were doing in Sutri would have helped me better situate myself while reading this utterly engaging travel memoir. Still, this is one of the best examples of the genre I've read in a long time.
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Summary: Immense Charm
Review: I enjoyed this book immensely. Michael Rips moves with his wife and daughter to Sutri, a town in Tuscany close to Rome, and discovers one of the oddest cast of characters imaginable. I suspect that Rips has a penchant for the odd and grotesque; still, I don't think he was inventing the aristocrat with a cat's paw for a hand, the old men with fond memories of POW camps in America, the restauranteur who refuses to serve dessert, or any of the other strange figures who populate this memoir of life in an Italian town. ...[The] book is a deeply welcome change from the ecstatic, sun-soaked memoirs typical of the genre. It also has a much more refined sense of history and sociology; Rips makes valient efforts to understand the unconventional mentality of the inhabitants of Sutri, all of whom attribute their marked clannishness to an Etruscan heritage (incorrectly, as it turns out.) This book was at once more realistic, and more fantastic than the average travelogue, almost like a fairy tale in the whimsicality of the stories it spun. My only quibble with the book is that Rips, a first-time author, didn't tell us enough about himself or what he was doing in Italy for me to really care about him or his family. The book has no sense of narrative; it's more a collection of sketches of his neighbors. I actually didn't realize Rips was an attorney until I read about it on Amazon; he portrays himself as a good-for-nothing layabout with no skills. A more honest account of himself, his family, and what they were doing in Sutri would have helped me better situate myself while reading this utterly engaging travel memoir. Still, this is one of the best examples of the genre I've read in a long time.
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Summary: Thank god this is NOT Bella Tuscany!
Review: I picked this book up praying that it would not be about the exploits of some annoying North American couple who buy an old, decaying villa, purportedly of historic renown, and then hurriedly write a book to pay for their folly. I didn't want Bella Tuscany, I wanted Ugly Tuscany. Something with an edge, rough. Broken terra cotta. Dusty. Weathered. Parched. Pasquale's Nose is all that and more. In this case we get Ugly Tuscia, which rests near between Umbria and Tuscany. Michael Rips is not working and on his wife's suggestion they up and leave the United States for the lovely Italian hilltown of Sutria. He gives us just enough information about himself and why he's in Italy to keep you interested. His wife has coaxed him to go the Etruscan village of Sutria so that she can paint. They have brought their infant daughter with them. If you've been to any tiny little hill in the Tuscan area then this book will fill on the pieces you may have wanted to remember when you returned home but forgot. Rips recounts some of the history the town, which is wry and funny like most things in Italy. The local characters that he describes throughout the book are what I remember vividly-coarse, refined, and yet slightly tart. You'll find out who Pasquale really is, who the outcasts of the town are, and more dirt than Bella Tuscany was willing to reveal. Think of this book as 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' in Italy.
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Summary: Nice Stories: Disjointed, Sometimes Funny, Meandering
Review: Read the rave reviews and then read the book yourself. Pasquale's Nose is a big disappointment and not tied together well, chapter to chapter. Michael Rips flits from subject to subject, character to character without developing anything enough to make you care and there is a rich seam of stories about the residents and history of Sutri to be told here. The book is unsatisfying and unfinished and attempts to be philisophical at the end with a discussion of Adam and Eve and the question "Where Are You?". Even so, I am glad I read the book because it opened up the village of Sutri, Italy -- and surrounding area -- for my further investigation. It whetted my appetite. I'll give Paquale's Nose that.
Rating:
Summary: Nice Stories: Disjointed, Sometimes Funny, Meandering
Review: Read the rave reviews and then read the book yourself. Pasquale's Nose is a big disappointment and not tied together well, chapter to chapter. Michael Rips flits from subject to subject, character to character without developing anything enough to make you care and there is a rich seam of stories about the residents and history of Sutri to be told here. The book is unsatisfying and unfinished and attempts to be philisophical at the end with a discussion of Adam and Eve and the question "Where Are You?". Even so, I am glad I read the book because it opened up the village of Sutri, Italy -- and surrounding area -- for my further investigation. It whetted my appetite. I'll give Paquale's Nose that.
Rating:
Summary: I Can't Believe It's Not Fiction
Review: Rips is an entertaining writer but few words in this book ring true. A town of 5,000 people in Italy where all the old folks (and others) speak English and a foreigner who speaks no Italian gets the whole scoop and makes great friends in a few months?
Truly unbelievable. The book started sounding made up with one of the first stories, about the beans--beans noted throughout Italy, by the way, as the only ones never to cause indigestion. By the end, it was total super realism. That said, Rips is an entertaining writer who should stick to fiction that's billed as such.
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