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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Italian Fever : Page 1, 2
After DV’s burial, the members of the funeral party are invited to dine at a neighboring villa. Lucy, suffering from "extreme fatigue, aching hunger, and an undercurrent of nausea," has a nightlong bout of indigestion following a meal of rich food and wine in an atmosphere of tension and intrigue. Later, in a weakened and semi-hallucinatory state, she locks herself out at night during a rainstorm. By the time she is found, wet and unconscious, the next morning, her illness has worsened dramatically. She is nursed back to health by Massimo Compitelli, the handsome, urbane employee of DV’s Italian publisher who has been assigned to act as her driver and guide. During her illness his tender, attentive ministrations develop into passion, and Lucy finds herself falling unexpectedly into an affair with a married man. The fever of the title refers to Lucy’s actual feverish illness, her fevered affair with Massimo, and the aura of romantic mystery through which she views the events and people around her. The passions in this tale are many – both of the flesh and of the mind – and are exemplified throughout by Lucy’s experiences with sex and with art.
With the eventual discovery of his last manuscript, DV is revealed to have become, finally, a tortured soul struggling to vindicate himself and become a true artist. After reading it, Lucy thinks, "Antonio was right. DV’s style was melodramatic, but it suited the story." While not melodramatic, Martin’s style in this book takes on the nature of its subject, almost as though it had been translated from Italian, a language that seems to invite exaggeration.
Ultimately, while the circumstances of DV’s death are mysterious, there is no mystery in the conventional sense, no murderer lurking in the shadows. The only mysteries are those of character, the only crimes those of the heart. The theme of the innocent abroad who gains insight into herself and her own culture by exposure to that of another country is hardly original, but Martin’s witty, sensitive treatment is delightfully fresh, showing us that there is always something new under the Tuscan sun.
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Vivian Dorsel, Managing Editor of The Berkshire Review, lives and writes in Richmond, Massachusetts. She holds degrees in psychology from Williams College and UMass/Amherst, and recently co-edited a volume for the Advances in Psychology Series published by Elsevier Science Press of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Her fiction, poetry and brief memoirs have appeared in The Berkshire Review, The Women’s Times, and The Artful Mind.