Falling Palace
by Dan Hofstaedter
Knopf, $187
The saying, 'See Naples and die', was inspired by the city's beauty, but in recent years the phrase has taken on a sinister connotation because of the lawlessness in Naples and the number of violent deaths - at least on its outskirts.
Dan Hofstaedter's memoir refurbishes the city's image. It's an affectionate, perceptive, intimate portrait of the Naples and Neapolitans Hofstaedter has known for two decades. He lived as a freelance writer in the city and had an affair with a Neapolitan student of the history of art, the lively but somewhat unhappy Benedetta. When he ran out of funds, he returned to New York, but, three years later, received a letter from Naples which took him back there in search of Benedetta.
Hofstaedter is well suited to Naples. He's intrigued by dreams and, because of his Neapolitan experience, comes to believe that our waking life is an attempt to live up to what we glimpse in them. He loves the rowdiness and crowdedness of Neapolitan streets, which 'flatten' his powers of discrimination: 'Overhead the clotheslines, billowing like the sails of a clipper ship, seemed sacred somehow, a declaration of thrift and progenitive power; and in the pork butchers' shops the displays of tripe and offal, neatly sliced open so that the insides of the insides might be rendered manifest, formed tall, dripping altars.'
