The House on Moon Lake

by Francesca Duranti

Overview

Fabrizio Garrone is an impoverished but aristocratic translator who has been living a life of quiet desperation in Milan. He feels underappreciated and tormented by a persistent sense of having been cheated by life. But when he reads about a lost Viennese novel — The House on Moon Lake — in the journals of a late esteemed literary critic, he dreams that this project will put him on the cultural and literary map, and finally bring him the accolades that have eluded him. Fabrizio journeys to Vienna, tracks down the book, and translates it, and in so doing embarks on a nightmarish search for the truth behind the events depicted in it, as well as for clues about the tragic life of its forgotten author. When asked to write a short biography of the novelist, Fabrizio must invent details missing from the last three years of his subject’s life. The resulting biography is a publishing phenomenon. But the repercussions for Fabrizio are profound: he becomes the willing victim of a person he had thought to be fictional.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781883285876
Publisher:	Delphinium
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Pages:	225
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Francesca Duranti is the author of many critically acclaimed novels and the winner of several of Italy’s most prestigious literary awards. She lives in Lucca, Italy. The House on Moon Lake is an international bestseller.

Editorial Reviews

"It is a mark of Ms. Duranti’s power that while we are left in suspense untl the end, we know that what is happening is inevitable, too."

The New York Times

"Like many gifted writers, Francesca Duranti illuminates the society about which she writes –contemporary Italy– with all the contradictions, illusions and hope. With rare skill [she] takes the ordinary pieces of Fabrizio’s life and creates an Italian mosaic, a mystery thriller of possibilities."

The San Francisco Chronicle

"Stimulating... entertaining... fascinating.... Lovers of literature and the arts will find this a delightful and rewarding volume."—Publisher's Weekly

From the Publisher

"An internationally acclaimed best-selling novel, Francesca Duranti’s The House on Moon Lake 'should be read alone, at one sitting, in the presence of teeming bookshelves, so that the ghost of literary artifice can hover as you read.'"

The Washington Post

It is a mark of Ms. Duranti’s power that while we are left in suspense until the end, we know that what is happening is inevitable, too.

The New York Times

This is a work whose imaginative power is so intense that the line between truth and fiction, reality and dream cannot be drawn. The protagonist, Fabrizio Garrone, is an impecunious aristocrat earning a meager living as a translator. He comes across a reference to an obscure novel, The House on Moon Lake, by Fritz Oberhofer, a little-known German writer. Tracking down the book, Fabrizio becomes obsessed by it. His enchantment with the original pervades his translation, so that in a profound sense he becomes the author, simply writing in a different language. So successful is the finished product that the publisher demands a biography of Oberhofer, which Fabrizio hastens to supply. But because Oberhofer disappeared during the last three years of his lifethe years in which he wrote his now-famous novelFabrizio invents a series of events, as well as a mistress, Maria Lettner. Soon, Fabrizio receives a telephone call from a woman claiming to be Maria Lettner's granddaughter, who invites him to a house on Moon Lake to read the correspondence between Fritz and Maria. Fabrizio acceptsand enters his fiction. And with a shiver of excitement and anticipation, the reader slips in beside him. (September 22)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Reissued to accompany Italian novelist Duranti's most recent book (see above), this multiple prizewinner (which first appeared in English translation in 1986) constructs an absorbing psychodrama from its faintly rarefied premise: a translator's surreal experience of the forgotten book and author that he (as it were) resurrects. Impoverished aristocrat Fabrizio Garrone, having successfully restored obscure Austrian author Fritz Oberhofer's neglected classic The House on Moon Lake to print, writes Oberhofer's biography as well—"inventing" material that takes on its own life, distracting Fabrizio from the down-to-earth orbit of his mistress Fulvia (a wonderfully sane character) and plunging him into an aesthetic nightmare such as Henry James might have dreamed. Ingenious, absorbing, and capped by a terrific surprise ending.

Kirkus Reviews