In Love with France, At Home In Italy

    I actually wrote this just for myself this morning while still happily in bed, but I am also going to foist it on friends who have had to listen to all our moaning and groaning about our misadventures while under the illusion we could learn to negotiate the Italian bureaucracy. HA!    Kudos to James for coming up with the first part of this title:  SISYPHUS AIN’T GOT NUTHIN’ ON US. And be thankful that what you’re getting here is the expurgated version of the story. In the interest of fairness to all, the profanity and yelling that might have accompanied this tale are not here, but please feel free to imagine where they would be. Here goes:    I don’t usually think about the literal meaning of “buongiorno,” but it’s already a great day because we don’t have to think about whether we’ll get a message from the Motor Vehicle people about coming to Viterbo to bring yet more documents for our car registration.    Yesterday we even turned in the ca...

DESPITE BEING MARRIED TO THE SAME MAN FOR DECADES, I CONFESS TO STILL FALLING IN LOVE QUITE REGULARLY. BUT NOT WITH ANYTHING OR ANYBODY ANYONE COULD BE JEALOUS OF. PAR EXEMPLE/AD ESSEMPIO/FOR EXAMPLE, THE ITALIAN GERUND, AND FRANZ KAFKA. Not to mention Albert Camus and Voltaire, with whom I'm in constant communication by letter. And lest you think I only fall for long-dead guys, I'll add the already married Andre Aciman, who had me from the first line of "Lavender" (See  DEAR ANDRE ACIMAN ).  And also my friend, Jacqueline Raoul-Duval, whose "Kafka in Love" is a revelation. I'm also torn between having an affair with two quite different literary detectives. At first I could never imagine the Sicilian Montalbano having a worthy rival. But then Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti came along, and now I don't know what to do. (See  THE MYSTERY OF HOW I FELL UNDER THE SPELL OF WRITE... )   And on the topic of quirky love affairs, I used to be in love ...

The “Hallelujah Chorus” is gloriously blaring, the mist over our valley is dissipating, and the hunters have temporarily stopped shooting (after all, it IS lunchtime in Italy). I’m thinking about letters: the one I posted here but never sent to Andre Aciman, the one Kafka never sent to the father who terrorized him, and the one Commissario Montalbano just wrote to himself in the novel I’m reading. Unlike the way it happened with Andre Aciman, with whom it was love at first sentence, it took me a while to get hooked on the Sicilian detective Montalbano. Although I went through an adolescent phase of devouring Mickey Spillane and his ilk, that is no longer my thing. Like the Italian husband who doesn’t “get” what his wife sees in the TV version of what he calls the “really short, bald, bow-legged Montalbano” who so often seems to be having an exasperated temper tantrum over the stupidity that surrounds him, I’m surprised at myself. I’m rethinking quite a number o...

Carissimo B, I just read our horoscope in today's local paper, and for once, I could actually understand it, and it's good: "A very positive day for work--you showed the capacity to create more favorable circumstances to score points and obtain what you want. But don't let yourself be carried away by enthusiasm. Remain vigilant until you have reached your goal. Big successes in love!" Actually, when I tried to type that last sentence, at first I wrote "BUG successes in love." Maybe that was a Freudian slip? The good news is that there seem to be way fewer bugs in the house. Not sure if it's just the season, or if they've decided to take a powder because of the nutty woman who keeps ushering them out via her cup-transfer system (that is, when not squishing them outright with the Giornale dell'Umbria--the source of such insightful horoscopes as the preceding). The problem with randomly killing bugs is that they could be Kafka, or Charlotte...