Book Review: The Last Supper

Published on Friday 30 January 2009 14:36

THE LAST SUPPER Rachel Cusk Faber & Faber, £16.99

THIS travelogue-cum-memoir begins with the author describing her disenchantment with God-spanked Bristol, and with the city's "slaving past", which seems ever-present in such street names as Whiteladies Road and Blackboys Hill. She chooses Italy as her refuge: "In the novels I read, people were forever disappearing off to Italy at a moment's notice… It was a cure for everything: love, disappointment, stupidity, strange vaporous maladies of the lungs. And for disenchantment too…" Such expectations, such valiant hopes.

She drives with her family down the Rhone (superbly evoked), towards Italy. The rain is incessant. The house they have rented is bitterly cold. The locals seem baffled by the foulness of the weather. Tuscany none the less offers generous compensation in ancient villages and churches crammed with old masters. They visit Florence and Assisi, guzzling the art, ambling though Lucca, encircled by 16th-century walls.

Cusk is often bracing and rigorous, interrogating Italy with the vigour and attention of a toddler asking fierce questions which must be answered. What is the history, the impetus, the whisper beneath what is heard, the inclination of the locals? She learns Italian on the hoof. She fastens on details such as the clipping sound of secateurs beneath a bedroom window; or the children cupping hands to gather fireflies.

Like the angels in the great paintings, Cusk is ascending, and on a learning curve, playing tennis, exploring the food, following Italy's World Cup football team, learning to value Raphael's "childlike love of life", and venturing outwards, antennae poised, towards Rome and Pompeii, seeking Capri but ending up in Positano.

She writes it all beautifully, applying her phrases like the brushstrokes of the masters she so admires. This is the finest memoir of Italy I have read since – 20 years ago more or less – Jonathan Keates' Italian Journeys made Italy suddenly seem irresistible and present in all its dimensions.

Cusk makes Italy sing, and she discovers, as she and the family face "the grey prospect" of departure, that she has changed. It's that kind of experience.