Langs Lijnen van Geleidelijkheid

A young Dutchman arrives in Italy seeking something he cannot name, and finds himself instead unraveling. Duco ten Berg wanders through pension rooms and feudal castles, from the grey waters of the north to the sun-blasted hills of the Abruzzen, in a novel that traces the delicate surgery of desire upon an innocent heart. His encounters with a passionate Italian countess and a swaggering hussar split him open, revealing how much there is to learn when one abandons the safe territories of platonic longing. Couperus writes with the sensuous eye of a painter, layering his prose with the gold-and-ochre richness of Italian Renaissance chambers, with lakes that burn at sunset, with the weight of glances that say more than language ever could. This is a novel about the dangerous education of the feelings, about how gradually one can become someone entirely other than who one began as, and about the particular cruelty of discovering that wisdom comes only after innocence is lost.