Review: Michael Robbins on “Bomarzo”

A literary crocodile, shaped like itself, of its own color.

Archival image, Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo, Italy

Bomarzo, my God, what a novel! The hunchbacked Duke of Bomarzo, famous for his park of monstrous statuary, having seemingly outlived the cinquecento by four centuries, having read Freud and Lolita, now composes his posthumous memoirs. Who wouldn’t want to read that? Besides the millions of Americans who read zero books per year.

Pier Francesco Orsini, Duke of Bomarzo, was a real person, and his Sacro Bosco, colloquially known as the Parco dei Mostri, is a real sculpture garden with giant statues of monsters. But otherwise, the Argentine writer Manuel Mujica Lainez’s novel is less historically accurate than Shakespeare in Love or Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. The actual Orsini did not have a spinal deformity, did not practice black arts, and did not live to see his four-hundredth birthday. We are at the beginning of the Latin American Boom—Bomarzo was published in 1962, a year before Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (the two books shared Buenos Aires's “John F. Kennedy Prize” in 1964)—whose most famous export will be Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, published five years after Bomarzo (which surely influenced it, though I can discover nothing concrete).

Bomarzo is not, however, a work of “magic realism,” a term that has outlived its usefulness. It has something in common with “alternate histories” like The Man in the High Castle or The Dragon Waiting, but it is not a work of fantasy. As the narrator describes the art of Michelangelo’s assistant Jacopo del Duca, it is the result of “an unusual linking, almost in jest, of minute realistic details within an environment of unreal essence.” The back cover claims it’s like Poe rewritten by Proust, which is not remotely true. (If I had to make up such a description, I’d go with Balzac rewritten by García Márquez.) Mujica Lainez’s novel is a literary crocodile, shaped like itself, of its own color.

Read Àlvaro Enrigue, who wrote the introduction to this new edition of Bomarzo, on Gabriel García Márquez for Book Post

Like the duke’s beloved castle of Bomarzo, this is a novel of hidden passageways, splendid ornaments, underground chambers, immense scaffolding, architectural marvels. And like the Sacro Bosso, it is a garden of monsters. It works because Orsini works—as a personality (a word that recurs throughout the novel), as a man of his time, and as a man out of time. He is—and with centuries of hindsight sees himself clearly as—a small-minded, vicious, envious, rancorous, duplicitous, and deeply insecure monster. “That was what they were like, unscrupulous. So was I. And since we are speaking about it, so was the Renaissance.” All of which makes him a charming narrator, whose Methuselan span allows him to quote Gérard de Nerval, refer to a contemporary as a Falstaff, and allude to Joyce and Browning (whose “Fra Lippo Lippi” could be a spiritual ancestor of Bomarzo).

Even after history has obliterated such distinctions, exposed their falsity, Orsini is always listing his illustrious forebears—the “popes … and the saints, and the martyrs, and the empresses, and the Queen of Naples, and the thirty Orsini cardinals”—and obsessing over his family’s coat of arms or who takes precedence at some function or whose family is older and more distinguished. His entire existence is devoted to living up to and furthering “the cult of my line, a devotion to that Orsinian glory that was centered and incarnate in Bomarzo, the maintenance of which had the dedication of my soul and energies.” Anything is permitted in the defense of this cult, including murder.

The novel emerges as a series of vivid set pieces as compelling as almost anything in Plutarch. Mujica Lainez’s scenes, like Plutarch’s, are “true to life,” a cliché I use advisedly, even when they are obviously made up. Often this is because they are bizarrely exaggerated, as life so often is, larger than fiction. Here are the Medicis and popes and emperors; pomp and palaces; feuds and poisonings and battles; plagues and witchcraft and miracles. On the day of Charles V’s coronation in Bologna—“One of those anthills was called Bologna and there was a special ant in it called the emperor”—the pageantry is rivaled by the sycophancy, the intrigue, the resentment and envy, the jockeying for position.

The extravagance of the Renaissance, Mujica Lainez makes you feel, was inseparable from the petty ridiculousness of those who had no idea they were living through it. Thus the duke is reluctantly embroiled in “a grotesque affair, worthy of Aristophanes,” in which two women in the neighboring village are annoying their neighbors by arguing over which of them has the right to feed the local horde of stray cats. They live on opposite ends of the same street, and each night, when “the feline flock would invade the solitude of Bomarzo with its felt and emeralds,” they advance toward each other like gunslingers, distributing food for the cats from baskets, each trailed by a kitty contingent “leaping like possessed people,” until they meet midway and hurl obscenities at each other. The neighbors appeal to Duke Orsini, who is forced to resolve the absurd dispute by dividing the street on a map and assigning one “nutritional jurisdiction” to each disputant, who are not to call back any traitorous cats that stray across the border into enemy territory. “They did call them, of course, in low voices, with cautious gestures which in their suppleness matched those of the tigerish rebels.” It is Renaissance Italy; allegories abound.

Read Michael Robbins in Book Post on Rilke, Ovid, and Baudelaire, as well as Marcel Proust, Paul Muldoon, Allen Ginsberg, apocaplypse by fire, trash, “Nancy,” the destruction of animals, and cheesy reading

Mujica Lainez, inspired by two visits to the Sacro Bosso, apparently knew very little of the real Duke Orsini. He relied on a paucity of sources, principally Cellini’s and Vasari’s autobiographies (both writers appear in the novel as friends of the duke). But Bomarzo contains two pieces of writing I know I will never forget, each a feat of uncanny verisimilitude. The first: the young Pier Francesco overhears his father at the fireside telling friends of the night he watched the immense statue of Michelangelo’s David wheeled through the streets of Florence. The description is so convincing, has such an air of this is what it must have been like—“at times his forehead was at roof level”—that I searched in vain for such an account in Vasari and Cellini. Then there is a portrait of Venice at its height that must have inspired Calvino’s Invisible Cities. “I can assure you,” Mujica Lainez writes as Orsini, “that a person who had not seen Venice in the sixteenth century cannot boast that he has seen it all,” and you believe him.

Gregory Rabassa, who translated both Hopscotch and One Hundred Years, transforms what must be an elegant Spanish into an English that deserves such skunked adjectives as ravishing, beautiful:

The night broke forth like a breath from the secret watercourses, amid the flapping of the bats, and ascended over the tops of the trees, over the stones, over the acropolis, and over the smoke from the hearths of Bomarzo, forming up above a jet-black lake, the projection of the lakes of the region, Trasimeno, Bolsena, Vico, and Bracciano, and of the swamps of Vadimone, where the power of the Etruscans had been extinguished, a lake on which the moon’s bark sailed, pulled by its silent oarsmen, and on the waves there floated, chasing each other with avid bird cries, the furtive divinities.

Rabassa has his detractors. William Gass carped of his version of José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso that “we know that the jungle has been cleared, the nighttime lit, the tangles, at least some of them, straightened.” Here, on a few occasions, he has completely lost his way in Mujica Lainez’s labyrinthine sentences, omitting a pronoun, forgetting the governing subject, failing to complete a clause. And he invariably gets the grammar of “would have liked to” wrong, writing “I would have liked to have had,” “would have liked to have used,” etc. But these are small defects, easily overlooked.

There is no reason Bomarzo should be less well known in English than Hopscotch or One Hundred Years (it has never been out of print in Spanish). With this edition, New York Review Books has done this dark-and-getting-darker world a real service. Now reissue The Wandering Unicorn.

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Michael Robbins is the author of three books of poems, most recently Walkman, and a book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music.

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