Book lovers who lack the resources to visit the Italian countryside will find the next best thing in Villa Coco, Andrew Sean Greer's gambol amid the rolling hills and olive groves of Tuscany. Greer has become a virtuoso at crafting charmingly episodic novels, as he demonstrated with the Pulitzer-winning Less and its sequel, Less Is Lost. Now Greer, who has spent much of his adult life in Italy, takes readers through a country he knows well, as seen from the perspective of a young man beginning his quest through the vagaries of adulthood.
The first-person narrator is "our young man," a recent college graduate who looks "so much more like a soulless marionette, an unenchanted Pinocchio, than a twenty-one-year-old American near the end of the millennium." This alleged milquetoast disembarks at a Tuscan train station with "brown shutters against yellow paint" that seemed "so fanciful you might unwrap it and find it was chocolate." He majored in Archives and Record Management and, at the suggestion of his adviser, responded to a job posting for the services of an "adjutant," or assistant. His role is to catalog the belongings of the Baronessa Lisabetta, better known as Coco, a rich 92-year-old widow. He learns, however, that his duties will include "dictation, pruning, shopping, [and] hunting martens," like the one that peeks into his room one night. Weirder still, the posting asked him to bring such non-archival materials as gin and fish oil.
Greer has created a delightfully eccentric tale filled with colorful characters and unusual developments. These include the protagonist's romance with Giacomo, Coco's married cousin, who "possibly works in publishing" and whose wife has a girlfriend; a boat named Caprice that figures prominently in the narrative; the contents of a cardboard package Coco needs to deliver to an unknown recipient; Pippa, Coco's princess friend, who once fell in love with a monkey; the mysterious disappearance of items he's supposed to catalog; and his eventual discovery of the true reasons that Coco wanted an archivist. Hidden in the frivolity is one young man's realization of an eternal truth: that people aren't always what they seem, even, or perhaps especially, among the upper classes. To catalog the items in a villa is one thing. To classify the mysteries of the human heart requires a completely different inventory system, as Greer demonstrates in this seductive work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: Villa Coco is the delightful story of a young archivist and his adventures in Italy as he attempts to catalog the possessions of an eccentric 92-year-old widow.