Love in Idleness

by Amanda Craig

Book Overview

In her delightful reimagining of A Midsummer's Night Dream , Amanda Craig slyly serves up a witty cross-cultural farce, a modern-day tale of love and lies set against the magical landscape of Tuscany.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400031079
• ISBN13: 9781400031078
• Release Date: June 2004
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

wonderful holiday read, charming and intelligent

I picked up this book in Cortona itself, and was enchanted from the very first page - although I have to say that sadly the town is less attractive and more touristy than that depicted in Craig's novel or Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun. The arrival of the Nobles, their family and friends (and particularly Betty, the mother-in-law who immediately commandeers the best bed in the house)were instantly and hilariously true to life. Yet there is also a deeper strain to the story, about the imagination and its powers to transform the way we see others, both erotically and as individuals. A novel about love and sex, it is also about children and literature. I was interested to see, after looking her up on the Internet, that Craig is a notable reviewer of children's books for the London Times. Perhaps this accounts for her remarkable portrayal of the way children, as well as their parents, see the world.

Not what I expected from the author of A Vicious Circle, but

Having been blown away by reading A Vicious Circle (why isn't this published in the US, by the way??)I was expecting a more satirical edge to Love in Idleness. As others have pointed out, it's based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the sexes reversed, and it would have been good to have had a cast that wasn't all successful professional people. Despite this, the book is an enchanting depiction of how that two-week summer break we all long for can go wrong, then right. The satire is mostly confined to Betty, the mother/mother-in-law who, face permenently frozen by Botox and disapproval, is the real villain of the story. The dialogue is superb, and I laughed aloud at the jokes about lawyers (Theo's firm is called Cain, Innocent). Polly's plans to pair off her oldest friends (including the lecherous Ivo Sponge, from A Vicious Circle)in the setting of an idyllic Italian villa go awry, and everyone swaps partners thanks to three children and a love potion containing Viagra that may or may not work. It's like a benign version of La Ronde - witty, sophisticated, and sympathetic even to the less attractive.I thought this written with even more assurance than A Vicious Circle, and a lightness of touch that somehow goes deeper. For a comedy, it has many melancholy touches that prevent it being just froth, and it describes is the way the world is transformed by love, and the imagination. It's easy to read, but demands an answering intelligence in the reader. The ending, incidentally,is one of the best I've read in a modern novel for a very long time.

Romantic comedy for guys too

If you don't see the point of your girlfriend's chick-lit, but still like to chill this is a surprisingly good novel - intelligent, literate, psychologically complex but light as the best British fiction. As loosely based on A Midsummer Night's Dream as Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love, it concerns the lives and loves of eight adults and three children on vacation together in Italy. There is a real love potion, an obnoxious mother-in-law, a surprise coming-out, but the novel's real substance comes less from borrowed Shakespearian plot than the ever-fascinating subject of the clash between the real and the imaginary, or between adulthood and childhood. A pleasure to read.

highly recommended

This book is highly recommended for reading groups. It's that rare thing, a novel that is a pleasure to read which also stimulates and satisfies a literary audience. Although lighter, brighter and in some senses frothier than In a Dark Wood it is a companion piece, exploring the weird and potentially disastrous interactions between children and adults. To this end, Craig has taken the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream and written a kind of prequel to it, with the play coming as the climax.An Amercian lawyer, his English wife and their friends and relations gather in the Tuscan countryside outside Cortona (Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun,anyone?) The idyllic Casa Luna promises a fortnight in paradise, but the combined feelings of the guests,and especially their three appalling kids soon has the company in ferment. Polly, Theo's English wife is the moral centre of the story but each guest has his or her own character strongly drawn. Before long, the children, Tania, Bron and Robbie (read, Titania, Oberon and Puck/Robin Goodfellow) are brewing up a love potion with Viagra from granny's purse. The ensuing complications, if not quite as hilarious as A Midsummer Night's Dream, are worthy of EM Forster.

Shakespeare meets Oscar Wilde

This is a delightful summer comedy that I thoroughly enjoyed -- a kind of "Shakespeare meets Oscar Wilde" in subject and wit. The plot is a contemporary version of Midsummers Night Dream, set in an idyllic Tuscan holiday home. It is the perfect book to take along on a vacation, full of fun and mischief and puns. Best of all, there is a horrible mother-in-law.