I have some friends who are staying in a village house in Tuscany for ten days. I keep getting wonderful photos on WhatsApp (thank you, Trish Sharkey!) and I get the feeling they’ve strayed into a book or a film. Terracotta pots, cobblestones, wild cyclamens, lichened roof tiles, stone walls, a chestnut wood with villagers gathering the nuts, weathered carvings, ancient trees, amazing views over the rooftops of the village… It’s picture perfect and could well be the setting for Villa Coco.
The narrator is first introduced as ‘our young man’:
I call him “our young man” because the sight of him – all gangly, double-jointed limbs, waves of filbert hair, and a raised eyebrow expression of both innocence and arrogance – is so much more like a soulless marionette, an unenchanted Pinocchio, than a a twenty-one-year-old American near the end of the millennium, that I can hardly bring myself to write about him in the first person. I’m sure an elderly toad, if magically presented with his younger tadpole form, would sooner eat it up than recognize the creature as any version of himself. So it goes with time.
Because the truth is “our young man” is me.
With a qualification in Archives and Record Management from an American university, our recently graduated, directionless, poor and very gay young man has found a job as ‘assistant’ to the Baronessa Lisabetta – Coco to her friends – in Italy. He arrives in the small village to find an elderly eccentric employer and an equally eccentric household of staff. The collection is a motley one of antique furniture and objects, antiquities and artwork, some valuable, some not – and he supposes that its cataloguing will occupy his time. Wrong. He is drafted into Coco’s outrageous schemes; there are friends and relatives to entertain, messages to run, trips to take, roses to prune and mad escapades to barely wriggle out of. Coco herself is a mixture of fabulousness and annoying craziness (I would have liked to sedate her at times); I was reminded of Aunt Augusta in Grahame Greene’s Travels with my Aunt‘. Or Patrick Dennis’s Auntie Mame.
This is a sweet, funny, charming, happy, touching, delightful book if you’re in need of such a thing. The writing is luscious and lyrical, the characters sharp, and it doesn’t all go as you’d expect.