Hilary Fanninreviews The Last Supper: A Summer in ItalyBy Rachel Cusk Faber and Faber, 219pp, £16.99
RACHEL CUSK, writer, wife, mother to two young daughters aged five and six, lies in a wintry bed in Bristol, listening to the disjointed sound of querulous drunks passing beneath her window, and contemplates her domestic life, “the days whose repetition had laid a kind of fetter on my soul”.
Cusk, a writer of almost electrifyingly intensity, has, over her high-voltage, award-winning career, often attempted to address the tension of being tethered to familiarity and routine by love and duty, and the overwhelming desire (present, I suspect, in many) to live a more creative, unencumbered existence.
“It is one or the other,” she writes, “duty or desire, freedom or responsibility”.
In her latest book, The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy, Cusk, her photographer husband and their two red-headed daughters sell their home and, prior to resettling in a different part of Britain, head off to spend three months in Italy on the trail of art. "We have closed the door on England as one would close the door on a dark and cluttered house and walk out into the sun."
Tracking the aroma of creativity through the narrow, sun-bleached, rubbish-strewn streets of southern Italy, the ruins of Pompeii, the garrulous Bay of Naples and the yellow-brown fields of Tuscany, studded with crumbling castellos and ancient, dignified olive trees (an area where the family settle, taking a short-term let), this is a miniature, tautly observed odyssey in a family estate, but also a colossal emotional journey for Cusk.
Central to the writer’s expedition are questions about the power and durability of art in a transient, often ugly world, and, much as she watches her daughters’ vain attempts to catch a firefly in a jam jar, a reluctant acceptance of the ephemeral, fleeting nature of parenthood.
The book is boned and corseted by Cusk’s research and meditations on Italian artists, from Piero della Francesca to Tintoretto, from a nervy, promiscuous Raphael to the bullish genius of Michelangelo.
Cusk does not reserve her pithy, merciless observations just for Italian painters, however: her stringent, undaunted annotations take in St Francis of Assisi (a dour misanthropist, apparently, whose bones must shrivel in distaste under the gaze of his many devotees) and indeed Christianity itself (“the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity”). She also applies her forensic eye to the living, breathing, gelato-eating Italians, French and Americans she meets on her travels.
Desperate to avoid being dragged into the ex-pat community life that festers in the valleys of her Tuscan hillsides, she is a reluctant participant in village life – but life comes to her, and her descriptions of the torpor, frustration and stasis that can affect such communities are delicately recorded.
Throughout the book there is the knowledge that, sooner or later, she will have to settle again with her children and that, whether she lives in Britain or Italy, there will be “routine, anxiety and conformity, there will be judgment and separation, success and failure”. And there will be readers who will become impatient with her introspection, and with her wanton (but refreshing) sense of detachment from the more mundane aspects of the world. Cusk is a writer whose rigorous intellect is always at play, whether she’s writing about a tomato or a tomb, and it is this very archness, this passion, that gives her beautiful, moving book such power. Indeed, her detailed examination of the tiny nuances that embroider family life give her account of her Italian summer the kind of luminosity she seeks, and finds, in visual art.
This book is a ray of intricate sunlight for a dark, damp month.
Hilary Fannin is a playwright and journalist