I'm perplexed as to why this book has received so many bad reviews on goodreads. In an effort to understand why some people seem to have loathed this book that I positively loved, I read through a few pages of the reviews. I can only conclude that many modern readers do not seem to have to patience to read a novel that presents a world that isn't steadfastly modern. Patience, or it's lacking come up over and over again in these negative screeds. Many didn't like the change in tone between the two protagonists of the book that occurs half way through, a change that is very accurate to the different kinds of characters represented, and so a change that one would think literary minded people would take well to. There is a lot of grumbling about the use of Italian throughout the book. I felt that it was the sort of sprinkling of cultural flavor that really gives a story like this polish, the Italian never being excessive or hard to interpret from its context. Still, I speak a fare amount of Italian, so maybe this is a fare criticism I simply wouldn't understand. When the reviews start complaining about how historical characters of such complexity as Niccolo Machiavelli or Cesare Borgia are portrayed by an author who is quite an expert in this period and in Machiavelli himself, I begin to wonder what's really going on here. I'm not sure we have to look farther than the television to see the culprit, as not one but two dramatizations of the Borgia's have graced our screens in the past few years, both entertaining in their own ways, but neither seem to have captured these characters quite right at all. Cesare Borgia was a monster, more rightly presented in this book than as the flawed but valiant hero of the television world. Machiavelli is not the Renaissance's own version of Data the Android, as a few reviewers would seem to prefer, but a living whole man who had an exceptional gift at analyzing the actions and drives of men, and who occasionally (by his own written account) fell quite annoyingly and humanly in love. He writes as giddy as a school girl on one or two such occasions to friends in letters available in his works to be read to this day. This, then, is a wonderful atmospheric book. Patience is a virtue, and if the reader is virtuous enough to have the attention span of something approaching a human beings, the reader may find a real treat in this novel. Lush language, descriptive, and always transportive, this is a book that can put you on the streets of many of the cities of early 16th century Romagna. The privilege of such a novel is in it's excellent portrayal of such luminaries of the Renaissance as Leonardo Da Vinci, who for my money Ennis nails as well as Machiavelli, to the brutish Condottieri who bullied the people of Italy for decades in lieu of any real leadership. But, let's not mince words. This is no baroque snoozer, this is an exciting mystery novel, not just an immersion is s fantastic world. I couldn't put the book down, and these guys put it down after a couple hundred pages? I'll say one thing. It's easier to understand why trite children's nonsense like the Hunger Games, or utter dreck like 50 Shades of Grey if so many of today's readers can't get through The Malice of Fortune. Heaven knows what these people would think of Bocaccio. By the by, David Mitchel peppers a novel with completely made up future speak and is lauded. Ennis throws in a little easily translatable Italian, and everyone is "annoyed." Literature, to be sure, was never meant to be spoon-feedable, like so much bland gelatin. Dat klinkt natuurlijk fascinerend als niet alleen Machiavelli maar ook Da Vinci op zoek gaan naar een kille moordenaar. Maar ook de mooie Damiata probeert erachter te komen hoe een reeks moorden in Imola in verband staat met de moord op de favoriete zoon van paus Alexander, de wrede Borgia. Het is fascinerend om mee te maken, nou ja, mee te lezen, over welke kennis Ennis beschikt maar anderzijds zit zijn ook vol clichés want mannen zijn brute machtsmensen en vrouwen verleidelijke schoonheden of naïeve dames. Maar als je probeert om geschiedenis en historische personen uit te beelden in een roman, ontkom je er wellicht niet aan. Helaas blijven de personen op deze manier echter allemaal nogal eendimensionaal. En van de intelligentie en de creatieve geest van een Machiavelli of een Da Vinci is niet veel te merken helaas. En omdat het ‘maar’ een verhaal is, is ook de historische diepgang nogal beperkt. Jammer eigenlijk.
Do You like book La Congiura Machiavelli (2012)?
Interesting mystery set in the Renaissance period, with Leonardo da Vinci as a supporting character.
—CSleeper
Very good...along the lines of The Prince by Machiavelli. Fast-paced and enjoyable.
—erica
An interesting look at religion, power, and mental illness during world history.
—camille
