Edmund returns to the family home following the death of his mother. There, he finds his brother Otto involved in a doomed sexual relationship with his apprentice David's sister Elsa, and Otto's teenage daughter Flora is pregnant. Otto's wife Isabel hopes that Edmund's presence will 'heal' the troubled family relationships, but Edmund feels unequal to the task.If Murdoch has a major fault, it's that her plots tend to fall on the silly side of melodrama. Flora reveals, post-abortion, that David was the father, and it transpires that Isabel is also in love with David and has been having a sexual relationship with him. David catches Edmund attempting to embrace attractive Flora, and taunts Edmund - as does everyone else - for his chastity, his lack of experience with women and presumed lack of interest. Edmund is the typical Murdoch male narrator, with a distaste for sex and vulgarity, and an ambivalent attitude towards women who, in Murdoch's work, are often either hysterical or ugly and pathetic (or both). Edmund displays the typical priggishness and prudery of the Murdoch male.David and Elsa are requested to leave, following an emotional confrontation during which Otto hits Edmund (an oddly cathartic moment for both of them, it seems).The money for Flora's abortion was lent to her by Maggie, 'the Italian girl', the family's housekeeper. She is taken for granted by everyone until the brothers finally find their mother's will, which reveals that she has left everything to Maggie. In a final melodramatic moment Elsa manages to set the house on fire and is killed. This moment of real tragedy seems to return everyone else nearly to their senses, and all the characters make decisions to go home - David back to Russia, Maggie back to Italy, Isabel back to Scotland under her maiden name (but not before revealing to Edmund that she is pregnant with David's child). Edmund himself finally understands his feelings for Maggie, and decides to go to Rome with her.Why are Murdoch's women either pathetic or psychotic, or both? Why are her men such stuffed shirts? Do people really behave like this? [Nov 2004]
Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl reads like a cross between a Victoria Holt Gothic romance and a glimpse of a Holden Caulfield, still clueless, self-centered, and easily offended at forty-something. The protagonist and narrator, Edmund Narraway, returns home for the funeral of his domineering and destructive mother, Lydia, after years away. Still living at the dark, gloomy family mansion are Edmund’s alcoholic, philandering brother Otto, Otto’s neurotic wife Isabel, their beautiful but reckless teenage daughter Flora, and the Italian au pair Maggie, who stayed on even as Flora outgrew her — the eponymous Italian girl. In the novel’s 171 pages, the Narraway family seeks fulfillment — both sexual and emotional — in the absolutely most destructive ways. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say that Otto’s Russian twenty-something apprentice, David Levkin, and Levkin’s promiscuous sister Elsa don’t make matters any better for the dysfunctional Narraway clan. (While their famous father was an artist, Edmund is an engraver and Otto is a stone mason.) Published in 1964, The Italian Girl seems dated even for that time period; the effete Edmund reminds me more of an over-refined English mama’s boy in a 1920s P.G. Wodehouse novel, while his monstrous brother could play the murder victim who’s begging to be killed in a Dorothy L. Sayers or Agatha Christie novel. From this book, while atmospheric and containing some beautifully turned phrases, I just don’t get what led millions to love Murdoch’s novels. The Italian Girl reminded me of the 1960s cult classic Dark Shadows — all dark, oppressive atmosphere and melodrama — but the Narraway family has none of the fun in its dysfunction. Despite some emotional fireworks, an unconvincing ending and long stretches of tedium make The Italian Girl a three-star read.
What do You think about The Italian Girl (2001)?
What a wonderful novel! Such complicated characters living in such a twisted reality yet, amidst all the chaos and damage, one funeral, one accidental death, a myriad of countless betrayals and misunderstands, and you still manage to come away with an incredible calm and peaceful contentment upon finishing. A happiness well worth living.This is a must read and a must 'live' story. Take up my challenge and give it a go...you might be surprised at the internal outcome budding within you when you finish.Devlin
—Devlin Scott
What is the term equivalent to "white trash" for the Brits? Well, I don't know, but here is a menagerie rife with those interesting, yet devastatingly bleak individuals--they are all mad--they've all taken X. "Beauty is such self-forgetting" (47)indeed--and this is a brilliant and breathtaking family portrait, so very post-Victorian Jerry Springer filthiness. First off, the strongly redolent, very judgmental narrator (and weakling) Edmund becomes immediately attractive to any reader who often ventures out of a definite comfort zone to stray off into the world's dark undercarriage. And the plot: He finds himself in a mad dream inhabited by imps: by more doubles and doppelgangers any possible reader could possibly want. The protagonist, like the reader himself, is faced with too much information too soon to possibly fit all too neatly in his restricted view and awestruck mind... He must work out all the cogs in the machine before the orchestra fully unfurls before him. Lastly, the pace is uberominous and foreboding--all of it frosting in an evenly-frosted delicious morsel. (Respect the gods of the almighty novella!) It arrives from the same stratosphere of the macabre as American Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Blithedale Romance."There is a commendable and dire need to be anti-Victorian with the superb Murdoch. It's vile and cool in equal measure. The erotic siblings, the not-too discreet lovers, all vicious and dripping in sex...well, it is all one huge cochinada (pigstyish) maelstrom!
—Fabian
What this book needs is more orcs. Or any orcs at all, really, but preferably a great horde of slavering, rampaging, hell-bent-on-destruction orcs. Failing that, zombies would do the trick. Or perhaps we could push swords into the characters’ hands and toss them into the gladiator arena. Frankly, they need something of the sort. A post-apocalypse world to shake them out of their fairyland and give them something serious to worry about. Because I’ve never come across such a snivelling bunch of whiny, self-absorbed morons who so badly need to just get over themselves. Here’s the plot, such as it is. Matriarch Lydia has just died, and son Edmund returns to the family home wherein reside his brother Otto and his wife Isabel, along with Otto’s apprentice and his sister, and the resident nanny-turned-housekeeper, the eponymous Italian girl. The story then unfolds with one melodramatic revelation after another, accompanied by much shouting, gesturing, grand speech-making, falling down, weeping and wailing, and running about in the rain. There isn’t one of them who seems to have an ounce of common sense, or any idea of just how lucky they are not to be working in a factory or down the mines.OK, OK, so I don’t get it. I probably lack the right receptors in my brain to get the point of a book like this. No doubt there are complex nuances of language or literature or philosophy or metaphor that simply whizzed over my head. I’m missing the point, I accept that. But it was short, and I finished it, so I gave it two stars. In future I shall leave Iris Murdoch to those better suited to appreciate the qualities of her writing.
—Pauline Ross
