Bomarzo

**“[Bomarzo] is a novel that will make any reader happy.... [A] novel to be read aloud, with the whole family gathered around.” —Roberto Bolaño A lavishly written gothic historical fantasy novel that centers around Pier Francesco Orsini, the tortured duke of Bomarzo and creator of the Italian town’s famously bizarre “Garden of the Monsters.”** Forty miles north of Rome, near the village of Bomarzo, Pier Francesco Orsini created a park of monstrous statuary in which the nightmares of the Renaissance stand preserved in stone. In Bomarzo, Manuel Mujica Lainez—one of the major Argentine novelists of the twentieth century—re-creates this dark and legendary duke as a briliant memoirist. From beyond the grave, in a city that sounds suspiciously like Mujica Lainez's own Buenos Aires, Orsini—who now knows his Freud and has read Lolita—looks back at the trials and travails of his sixteenth-century life. Bomarzo is a historical novel in the grand manner, a first-person portrait of a hunchback bullied by his family and determined to prove a villain. It is also a commentary on such historical fictions. But above all it is an immersive story told in a sumptuous style—like one of Poe's Italian tales rewritten by Proust—as Gregory Rabassa's translation beautifully conveys.