Innocence

By Penelope Fitzgerald and Julian Barnes

Stunning modern new cover reissue of one of Penelope Fitzgerald’s best-loved novels

Innocence is set in the 1950s, when Italy was picking up the pieces after the war. Chiara Ridolfi is the guileless daughter of a decrepit Italian family. Barney is her practical English girlfriend, who can sum up a man, she says, in one firm hand-grip. Salvatore is a penniless doctor from the south, who thinks he is proof against politics, social conscience and tenderness. Chiara’s cousin, Cesare, says very little, which gives him time to think…

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9780007555659

Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most distinctive voices in British literature. The prize-winning author of nine novels, three biographies and one collection of short stories, she died in 2000.

Reviews for Innocence

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My first introduction to Penelope Fitzgerald's work had come with 'The Bookshop', and with this second helping I feel like I'm on the road to becoming a big fan. Her writing never calls attention to herself, and yet it is some of the most penetrative, striking prose I've ever seen. In 'Innocence' this characteristic voice carries the reader through what is not the most incredible plot to have ever graced literature, and yet you don't mind the otherwise pedestrian story simply thanks to the joy of reading each sumptuous paragraph. I've got more Fitzgeralds on my bookshelf, and I'm eager to move on to the next.

[junipersun · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Read for a book club. Very boring litany of misunderstandings, assumptions, minor complaints raised to major calamities in the imagination. 1950's impoverished genteel Italian family, daughter schooled in England falls in love with a doctor & gets married. A lot of unhappiness on the part of all.

[elizabethpisani_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The first Penelope Fitzgerald I ever read. I went on to read everything she has written. Which tells you something.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In mid-50s Florence, the Ridolfi family is both an historical sport of nature and precious stock that needs grafting to the deep roots of political consciousness that will herald the future. The count and his daughter are both of the world but also strangely absent. However, when the teenage Chiara falls head over heels for Dr Salvatore Rossi while standing in the rain during the intermission at a concert, she sets in train a sequence of events that will eventuate in romantic bliss or disaster. Meanwhile, Salvatore, who as a child met the dying marxist Antonio Gramsci, is as perplexed as he is smitten by both Chiara and her famous family. He is driven to distraction, which is not a comfortable state for a psychiatrist. How can he go on? How can he not? It is, as ever, the unanswerable question.Fitzgerald’s prose here is both delicate, almost fastidious, and gaudy. The humour, when it arrives (and it comes often and in droves) is beyond farcical. Yet there is such a sweetness about Chiara, the disturbed Salvatore, and Chiara’s blundering English friend, Barney, that you can’t help falling in love with all of them. The fact that the novel doesn’t really go anywhere makes it hardly any different than life itself. And Fitzgerald clearly sees both the muddle and the majesty of life.The wandering style and the Italian families might be confusing at first, but this is a novel with as much evidence of Penelope Fitzgerald’s mastery as any in her oeuvre. Recommended, as ever.

[qofd · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is the third and last book by Fitzgerald I will read. I just don't like what she writes about and how she writes it. Each book is a struggle. Just not my style.

[pensivecat · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't get it. Am I missing something here? At first I thought i was a cute, quirky story about an old Italian family whose half-Anglo daughter meets an Italian doctor and gets married. But there is no clear reason why they fall in love, or how their relationship builds or even gets rather stormy. Occasionally a bit of humor sneaks into a sentence, and to catch it you really need to pay attention. An English friend, Barney (a girl), is sort of fun, but even her actions don't make any sense. The climax in the end seemed rather dramatic, then fell flat. So there were moments, but not enough.

[michaelm42071 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A stormy love affair starts between a twenty-nine year old doctor, Salvatore Rossi, and Chiara Ridolfi, just out of school and nineteen. He comes from a poor rural family in the south and his father worshipped Antonio Gramsci, whom Salvatore saw dying when the boy was ten. Chiara comes from an old aristocratic family of decaying fortunes; they have a villa, the Ricordanza, a farm at Valsassina which now produces a little wine for sale, and a palazzo in Florence. The Ricordanza is named after the verse in Dante where Francesca asks whether memory in her situation is the worst misery in hell or a small consolation. Chiara’s school friend, the formidable Barney (Lavinia Barnes) comes to help. Complicating rather than helping are Chiara’s gentle, retiring father, Count Giancarlo Ridolfi, his sister Maddalena, and his nephew Cesare, who runs the farm. Chiara and Salvatore marry, but his bristliness and Chiara’s direct, unswerving honesty make for continued friction, which becomes public in a funny scene at a villa party given by a family friend, Professor Pulci. One of Fitzgerald’s themes is the irrational manner in which those who love each other can get into and sustain arguments. Another is the notion of children recognizing that in a particular situation they are older than their parents. Something she repeats here is the way deception becomes easier with practice. And as always, we wonder how she knows so much about Italian farming, Gramsci, and various other arcane matters.