An enormous book, the fictionalised autobiography of Giuliano Sansevero, scion of a noble Neapolitan family fallen on hard times through the worthlessness of its latter generations. Giuliano is called upon to restore the family fortunes and here is the story of his life; childhood in a Gormenghast-like castle, his education in an austere monastery, followed by his acceptance and then rejection of the burden his family has laid on him.


Like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, the book is rich in characters and atmospheres; but unlike Gormenghast Sansevero is quite unambiguously set in the modern world, beginning in 1912. Political events such as the labour strikes and demonstrations after the end of World War One and the Fascist takeover of 1922 show up, diffracted through the lenses of various members of Giuliano’s large, often bizarre family. This view from society’s upper echelons is carried out with a consistency that makes the book an authentic portrait of its times; its panorama of mid-century Europe takes Giuliano to Milan, Paris, Ischia, then as an officer to Occupied Greece and finally to the Götterdämmerung before Berlin as the Red Army sweeps in to crush Hitler’s last stand.


A fascinating book, full of accurate history and psychological insight into the mind of a diffident but cultivated man.

‘one entered a second room, also very dark, and inhabited by a decrepit parrot as motionless as a stuffed bird on its perch, but which, on hearing a sound, roused itself and shrieked its own name, which was the usual one of Polly...on a long verandah with hexagonal panes, whitish alternating with Prussian blue, four aged people sat immobile in a row at approximately equal distances from each other, in enormous armchairs like statues in a museum...And the great-aunts and uncles, the one blind, the other paralysed, the third obese, sat there without moving, and this for days, months, years, in a solemn and fearful silence broken only, from time to time, by Polly’s raucous cry.’ p31