Ursule Molinaro is one of the most gifted novelists we have.
Encores for a Dilettante
Ursule Molinaro
On the morning of his 45th birthday, a youthful-looking Professor of English Literature finds himself sitting cross-legged on an unfamiliar hotel bed. Once again his freckle-faced reddish-haired Irish concert-harpist wife has walked out on him.
Flying faster & faster non-stop against the rising sun, he begins to perceive the imprint he has left in time: backing into his wife-less apartment the evening before into the parting scene one of his many girlfriends made him several years earlier into a brief previous life as a clammy little girl into 17th century England, where he was a printer, leveler, & ladies’ man, about to be hanged into 14th century Rome, where he was a gout-ridden high priest & finally into pre-recorded history, when he was a Happy Hermaphrodite, worshipped as a living symbol of fertility.
A freckle-faced reddish-haired Irish-looking chambermaid intrudes to clean the room …
… takes us through wonderfully funny patterns of social observations and ingenious wit … Ursule Molinaro is one of the most gifted novelists we have.
One happy sign of the times is that the style in which this witty, sad novel is written need no longer be described as “experimental” … Miss Molinaro deserves congratulations and lots of readers for pulling off such a feat …
Molinaro’s new novel is further evidence that the realm of literary art is not determined by national boundary lines.