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BOOKS
MAGIC AFOOT IN TUSCAN HILLS Marina Brown’s latest novel explores evil and its antidotes
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by STEVE BORNHOFT
Author Marina Brown, a frequent contributor of articles to Tallahassee Magazine, drew upon her encounter while working as a psychiatric nurse with a psychosomatic patient as the basis for her novel, The Orphan of Pitigliano.
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ou learn about Marina Brown that she is a sailor, a painter, a cellist, a traveler, a former professional ballet dancer and a one-time nurse. You learn further that she is a writer of poems, short stories, novels and newspaper stories. And, then, as you get to know the woman beyond the sketch on her book jackets, you discover that she has a passion for pingpong, and you are not all that surprised. Brown, of Tallahassee, is not the sort of woman for whom anything goes, but she is someone for whom many things go. Knowing that, I should have studied the busy cover of her latest novel, The Orphan of Pitigliano, a little more closely than I did before reading the work. There was sure to be something there beyond the depiction of a Tuscan hilltop town and ochre figures and objects suggestive of cave paintings. And there was. The “O” in Orphan as it appears in the title on the cover is not merely an “O.”
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March-April 2021
It is an easily overlooked eyeball with a bright blue iris, unblinking of course, and a wee disturbing — a representation of il malocchio. Brown, in Orphan, will not be confined to a single genre. It is not her nature or style. Instead, she artfully pingpongs between historical fiction and romantic fantasy. Complicating the latter is a jealous sort, Rebekah, with a bum leg and a superpower: She is possessed of an evil eye whose withering effects may be reversed only by people wielding artifacts infused with the magic of the past. Brown, at intervals, recounts the progress of World War II and in so doing, demonstrates convincingly her familiarity
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with Italy and a command of history. She reminds us of mankind’s capacity for the most craven inhumanity and depicts wrenchingly the lengths to which Jews went to avoid death at the hands of the Germans and their allies, lengths that included abandoning one’s identity, assimilating to the outlook of the enemy and carrying out its wishes. Genocide provides the novel’s backdrop, and in the foreground, bitchiness advances the plot. There is much badness about, so much so that protagonist Giuliana, seen by her malevolent cousin Rebekah as a rival, concludes that “in the end, it is evil that triumphs and the powers of good that fall impotent.” photography by SAIGE ROBERTS
