This is my 4th Rachel Cusk book (after the Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy). I chose to read The Last Supper because at the end of the 1980s (on a whim) my wife and I took our 3 young children (3, 6 and 9 years old) to live in Italy indefinitely. No one bothered about the 30 day visa. Unlike Cusk we had no plans or bookings but being Australians (who are sort after because we fix things) we landed on our feet by becoming caretakers of a converted 9th century monastery between Florence and Arezzo, not far from where Cusk stayed. Once the locals discovered we were not German (we sound German to their ears), we were taken in by the community. The children went to a local school and were fluent in Italian within a couple of months. My wife studied fine arts in Florence and I got a job teaching English to a haughty blonde Florentine bella donna with whom I'd walk with, arm in arm in the Piazza, chatting (intimately) about whatever came to mind. I learnt more Italian than she did English. We got to know the Tuscany quite well through autumn, winter and spring. During the first summer we left the monastery and eventually went south so that the children could climb Mt Vesuvius. We had a tiny car and a tent and camped for months (very rarely in camp grounds) until snow drove us into a stepped hill-town in the Abruzzi where again the children went to school and again the community included us.

Having read Cusk before, I had expectations of insights into ground I thought I knew quite well. At first, I was not disappointed. Her wry insights into the pages of Contatti and observations of the characters she encounters on her travels were a delight. But then, a veil descends and she (and her family) vanish from sight. We are not given much of a glimpse of her husband or her children. The veil is not really lifted until the last pages of the book. Ultimately, there is a kind of profoundly English drabness that makes the veil a kind of smog. It seems to keep Cusk from sharing her intelligence beyond the superficial descriptions of place and people (which she does well and with economy) but there is and was so much more to explore that, by the end, I felt cheated by the limitations and constraints of this resolute Englishness. In a curious way the selection of photographs mirror the text. Their resolution not quite enough to be fully readable, some obscure, many superfluous.

This is not to say there were not moments in the Last Supper that make it worth reading. The enchantment of their stay in the Ardèche with Bertrand lingers. There is a vitality surrounding the tennis matches with Jim and Amanda that makes me feel as if I was present. Cusk lightly touches on the way time expands and contracts, on being together as a family, on the way children can bond instantly, on not being a tourist but not quite belonging, on not finding a place to stay the night, on the forces of disorder in Naples, on being Italian, but she just touches, she doesn't fully embrace anything except her standoffishness and the inevitability of returning to her fold. I think her writing works best when she is present and visible; not hiding behind a veil of descriptive commentary. ( )

Travel envy is hitting me HARD. ( )

My review of this book can be found on my YouTube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/8z4PzmtUx9g

Enjoy! ( )

Een verslag van een zomer lang vakantie in Italië, door een italofila voor andere italofili (vooral Britten). Met vooral aandacht voor kunst en met toch iets meer diepgang dan een reportage in bijvoorbeeld Vlaanderen Vakantieland. ( )

I expected to like ‘The Last Supper – A Summer in Italy' much more than I ultimately did. When I first read the blurb on the back, it seemed to promise everything I would enjoy … a personal-style memoir, a family trip to an exotic locale – namely Italy, with its heritage of wonderful food, beautiful locations and inspiring art. However, the book never lived up to that promise.

Rachel Cusk undertook the summer trip to Italy with her husband and two young children as a way to stave off the boredom and tiresomeness of her life in England. Sadly, she seemed to have taken that boredom with her, carried it around for the entire trip and ultimately wrote a book about it.

I have to be honest and say that I ended up skimming some parts of it, when the utter depressiveness of Cusk’s descriptions of particularly the people she met began to fight with my desire to finish the book. None of the people in Cusk’s book come alive in any way at all. Everyone, including her husband and children, seem to be cardboard cutouts, and there is no way to relate to them in the least. The people who the family meets during their trip are all strange, vaguely frightening, and not particularly likeable either. The author appears to be at once bored with and slightly contemptuous of all of them. That makes for a ponderous read that felt like a lot of hard work for not much reward.

The one redeeming thing about this book is the descriptions of the art which the family have also gone in search of, in order to bring some kind of beauty back to their lives. Cusk seems to have saved all her passion for the artwork, the descriptions of which are wonderful and fascinating, making me want to see them for myself. The book thus might appeal more to a lover of art than someone who wanted more of a story relating the family’s feelings about their experience.