The Smiles of Rome: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers

By Norman Mailer

Book Overview

Take a Roman holiday with some of the world's greatest writers Explore the Palatine with Elizabeth Bowen. Visit the temple of the Vestal Virgins with Georgina Masson. Analyze Michelangelo's Moses with Sigmund Freud. Stroll through ancient streets with Goethe and with Henry James. Share Alice Steinbach's midnight epiphany on a shabby hotel balcony. Learn the art of love from Ovid. Visit villas and gardens with Edith Wharton. Enjoy Rome's myriad moods and pleasures with Robert Browning, Eleanor Clark, Susan Vreeland, and many others. An irresistible collection of writing about one of the world's most beloved destinations, The Smiles of Rome spans the centuries from ancient times to the present day. Each essay resonates with the richness and turmoil of the past and overflows with a great wealth of fascinating facts and intriguing tidbits for today's avid readers and travelers. "Rome," writes Susan Cahill, "has the power to blow your mind and heart." This delicious, many-layered collection honoring the city that is the heart and soul of European civilization has the same power to thrill.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 034543420X
• ISBN13: 9780345434203
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Jesus, Still Comtemporary After All These Years

This book is a remarkable feat of scholarship, especially in its ablility to remain highly readable despite its scholarship. We find here a very human portrayal of a man struggling to literally embody God, and, despite the scope of such circumstances, we are oddly able to empathize with Jesus. He confronts his extraordinary situation, paradoxically, as an ordinary man. The spareness of the biblical style helps us forget the author and the complex theological and historical weight that the story carries. We are able to focus on the personal, day-to-day, hour-by-hour inner life of Jesus, the man. If you expect quirks and controversy, forget it. If you expect either a born-again, hysterical excitement or a ponderous intellectual examination, take a pass. But, if you are looking for an intimate look at the plausible humanity beneath the religeous and emotional furvor, then read this book. Mailer's account is particularly comprehensible to the 90's mind in that he allows us to see Jesus coping consciously with the dangers his "celebrity" as a miracle worker begin to pose. In our celebrity conscious, media saturated time, we are perhaps more ready to appreciate the "crowd-control" aspects of the story of Christ, and the practical and psychological impact that those factors must have had on Jesus' day-to-day decisions. So how can a jewish author in the 1990's create a plain spoken text in biblical dialects that becomes an exciting "page turner" even though we all know from page one exactly how it is going to turn out in the end? No matter how unlikely, Mr. Mailer has accomplished that feat. Read it with an open mind and your mind will open still further.

Lovely, easy-reading story

A book I re-read every few years, and always enjoy. A lovely interpretation of what Jesus may have been thinking moment-to-moment, day-to-day.

Silence Is Golden

This book is respectful of the silence and space found in the gospels. It is a fine novel- intentionally simple w/out being simplistic. I found it more meditative than dull, but then again I like dull things.

well done and highly recommended

I had never read in the genera called "Life of Jesus." I had heard good things about this book, and it was well reviewed by many sources I trust. I've not been disappointed. It tells about Jesus' ministry in a Mark-like fashion (i.e. minimal interpretation, more a description of events) but with a twist: Much of the time we are treated to Jesus' own introspections about what he is doing and what he is wrestling with. Obviously this is fiction, but the deeper question is where along the spectrum of reporting among documentary, interpretation, and fiction do the gospels lie? Mailer has also read in some ancient Jewish and Christian sources and has incorporated things that, ceteris paribus, Jesus would probably have been aware of as his own ministry progressed. The style has a hauntingly minimalist grammar to it, pithy and saying-like, which we come to often associate with the words of Jesus. This makes the work all the more effective. This was my first Mailer book too, so I'm not a groupie, but I've come to respect this author already.

A triumph: a trinity of courage, compassion & poetic genius

"Only a novelist as daring as Mailer would attempt to retell the story of Jesus in Jesus's own words. . . . Its penetration into Jesus's human heart rivals Dostoyevsky for depth and insight. Its re-creation of the world through which Jesus walked is as real as blood. Ultimately, Mailer convinces, more than any writer before him, that for Jesus the man it could have been just like this; and that is, in itself, some sort of literary miracle". Publishers Weekly (Quoted from the back cover of THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON, paperback) I cannot think of a more perfect book to read and give as gifts for the Holidays, to people of all faiths OR lack thereof.I have heard for years that Norman Mailer's ego, with its supposedly massive size, has this way of getting in the way of his message and transcendant literary skill in everything he writes; as if there is a watermark of his opinion of himself printed on every one of his sentences that becomes visible when you hold them up to the light of day. Though that isn't my excuse for not reading any of his work before this, I can only imagine how much jealousy lay in the hearts of those who proclaim this as a caveat whenever his work hits the market and touches the surface of the universal human heart after reading THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON. Far from attempting to completely de-spiritualize or Freudian-ize Jesus into spiritual insignificance, Norman Mailer attempts--and for me is successful--at something far more creative, courageous and important.Mailer, with THE GOSPEL... allows for new spiritual and compassionate eyes to see the Christ, via giving the documents describing the life and Tao of Jesus in the New Testament a completely different context and perspective. He reveals the hidden dynamic of the unconscious deification of the writers of the synoptic gospels--and their writings--that not only runs centuries deep, back into the early stages of the Catholic Church, but perhaps is the genesis of the environment which necessitated the appearance of the Son of Man and his revolutionary message among the Hebrews in Jerusalem in the first place--centuries before he came. And then Mailer returns THEM, not Jesus, back into the very human, epic poet/journalist-symbols of the Ancient Near East Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul originally were; making an unconscious debate over THEIR message (as opposed to Jesus') masquerading as love of Christ, intellectual sophistication or piety--yea or nea--irrelevant. All by trying to tell Jesus's story in something of his own words. Nietzsche has said in HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN that it is the degree to which one can display a most positive vision or illusion of ONESELF that decides and structures both the opinion we have of people, places and things in the world and the way in which we express it: the Narcissistic impulse of man's ego. Mailer's courage is in revealing this truism's agonizing power, as it may have infused the very religion to which much of Wester