A Nose for Humor by Uriel Dana

books:

	• Pasquale's Nose: Idle Days in an Italian Town Michael Rips Back Bay Books, 2002 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Zen Italy

Michael Rips described himself as a lost soul who has no useful skills and can find no direction in life. This is the author, lawyer and writer Michael Rips, speaking about a character, "Michael Rips," who bears no more relation to the author than the character "Woody Allen" bears to the famous film actor and director.

I was pleased to learn in another review that the town of Sutri actually exists. Although that other reviewer states that this town is perfectly described by Rips, I had my doubts whether there was such a town, or, if there were, it bore about the same relation to Rips "Sutri" that Rips the author bore to his character. In any event, it would not matter, because despite the local color it lends to the book, the place is not in itself of great importance. Quirky people can be found making a life together everywhere, and that is what this book is ultimately about.

The book consists of short chapters composed of shorter vignettes. The first chapter establishes the character "Rips", the setting "Sutri", and the situation that brings Rips and his wife to that town: the author's inability to do anything useful. The character then hangs out in cafes and tries without much success to engage the locals and understand them.

Unlike the authors of Italian Neighbors (Tim Parks) and A Small Place in Italy (Eric Newby), Rips never succeeds in penetrating the town, and his character descriptions of the locals are mere anecdotes describing their incredible eccentircities. As one friend expresses it, the Sutrini are "mad, mad".

But about halfway through the book, this premise sufficiently established, Rips stretches out. The eccentricities are replaced by genuine paradoxes, and each anecdote becomes something of a zen koan. Reflections on these may be highly amusing, but will not yeild to rational understanding.

By the end of the book a convincing world of paradox, a zen world, is established. In creating their town, the Sutrini have relied on collective myths (many not merely mythic but demonstrably false) which over time have affected the being of each of the residents as they strive to fit in and make sense of their lives. In this way the town is more than the sum of its parts, and each resident is less an "individual" than a living "particle" in this larger whole. It is impossible to live in this world as a rational autonomous "individual" or to understand the Sutrini one by one as individuals.

Thus the portrait of the town comes to its own sort of wholeness and completeness, not merely despite the absence of penetrating character studies of the locals, but because of it.

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The place is for real...

Having read and greatly enjoyed this story, I later found myself at Sutri enroute from Rome to Tuscany. My wife and I stopped to stretch our legs and see the town. It is as described, and so are the people. When Michael's name and/or book were mentioned, most people rolled their eyes (lovingly). This book made a visit to Sutri infinitely more enjoyable, and made it a special place among places on the Via Cassia (SS2).

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A Nose for Humor by Uriel Dana

"The kind of book you want to read out loud to someone.... even the stranger sitting next to you!" Uriel Dana

History, eccentric characters & dry wit synergistically arrange themselves into laugh-out-loud combinations in Pasquale's Nose.
In each chapter Rips demonstrates brilliant observational and storytelling abilities.

By the end of the book, all of these surreal characters began to develop a larger, over-soul quality. They reminded me of cultures like the Aboriginal Australians that perceive realities on more than one level. The stories and the history of this place are not only extremely interesting and funny, but they left me pondering the possibilities for hours.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Everywhere hailed for its quirkiness, its hilarity, its charm, Pasquale's Nose tells the story of a New York City lawyer who runs away to a small Etruscan village with his wife and new baby, and discovers a community of true eccentrics-warring bean growers, vanishing philosophers, a blind bootmaker, a porcupine hunter-among whom he feels unexpectedly at home.

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