advance. For anyone else the discovery of an unknown novel that becomes a best-seller would be progress. But Fabrizio has no real desire to engage the world. He genuinely likes the friends who encourage him to do so, and tries for their sake--but this is not enough. Their encouragement and support only enable him to pretend for a while (to himself and to them) that he possesses any desire for anything.
As Duranti's novel opens Fabrizio is found in a library. His father had ruined his extremely wealthy family with reckless speculation and Fabrizio had salvaged from the wreckage "only the books in his family library," a few other small things, and a small sixteenth century panel painting, Saint Jerome in His Study (3). Under this sign of austere scholarly detachment and withdrawal from the world Fabrizio, appropriately, has become a translator. But where St. Jerome's translation of the Bible into Latin permanently influenced European culture, Fabrizio translates technical writing and the occasional novel. The degree of Fabrizio's fall is indicated in the subsequent meetings with a publisher, Colombo, who has to repress the slight bow that comes naturally to many people in the presence of the aristocratic Fabrizio. The loss of status that accompanied the loss of wealth is also problematic for Fabrizio's only friend, another publisher, Mario, who has been his friend since childhood. Mario too is deferential toward Fabrizio, and hastily withdraws his question about an article by an intellectual when Fabrizio expresses his disdain for the man. Mario's "opinions, like his clothes, always seemed, by comparison, less elegant than Fabrizio's, even when the former were much sounder and the latter more expensive" (12).
All this deference is clearly misplaced, yet there is something in Fabrizio that draws real interest. He fascinates people as if he were a work of fiction. Mario had always experienced him in this way. Living t...