by Andrea Lee
Years after their intimate triangle has ended, they all look back ruefully and realize, to a certain extent, that the glamour of otherness is an illusion, and that a step into the unknown always ends in the acquiring of knowledge and its harrowing mixture of good and evil, and in a further awareness of our common mortality.
RC: Are there certain authors who have inspired your writing? Which books have been the most influential over the course of your career?
AL: My two favorite books are Kipling’s classic adventure novel, Kim, which is a meditation on identity and the varieties of truth; and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which is about the various ways of looking at good and evil. Other writers who have been important to me range from Anthony Trollope to Isak Dinesen, from Jean Toomer to Phillip Roth. But the two books I had most in mind when I wrote Lost Hearts were A Moveable Feast by Hemingway and The Children’s Bach by the great Australian writer Helen Garner. Both novels deal with a kind of innocence in marriage that is eventually destroyed.
RC: Each of your characters possesses unsympathetic qualities; for instance, Mira betrays her husband and child, and Zenin is cold and calculating. Yet they are entirely identifiable and understandable to the reader. How do you go about creating such complex, human characters?
AL: When I create a character, I try to be simultaneously inside and outside his or her brain—inside weaving a language of memories and emotions, and outside looking on with a kind of amused compassion. You can become very attached to the most unpleasant characters. For example, I loved creating Zenin.
RC: What is your writing process like? Do you have a set schedule or routine?
AL: I have an office in my house in Turin, and a set writing schedule from about eight-thirty in the morning until about three-thirty in the afternoon, when my eleven-year-old son, Charles, returns from school.
RC: What are you working on now?
AL: My next two projects are already under way. One is a novel called The Red Island House, about sexual tourism in the beautiful country of Madagascar, where I spend part of every year. The second is a series of interlinked short stories about the complicated, sometimes scandalous life of a large Italian family, as seen through the eyes of their adopted South African daughter. So as usual, I am exploring race and culture and the many ways of being foreign.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1) Andrea Lee has created complex characters who have multifaceted emotions and motives: Zenin shows both coldness and tenderness, Nick is caring and bitter, Mira both loves and betrays. Which character do you identify most with, and which do you find most sympathetic? Which did you find the least sympathetic?
2) When Zenin invites Mira on his yacht, she surprises herself and Zenin with her sudden forward behavior. Lee describes the moment as Mira “struggling not against him but against something in herself”(chapter 3). What motivation lies behind her actions, and what effect does it have on both of them? What emotions are Mira grappling with?
3) What effect does each outsider’s voice at the end of each chapter lend to Lost Hearts in Italy? How does it change or add to the reader’s perspective?
4) How would you characterize the bond between Mira and Zenin? Is it mainly comprised of physical attraction, or is it a power struggle? Do you believe they love each other? Discuss how their relationship progresses over the course of the novel.
5) Discuss the theme of displacement—geographical, racial, and romantic—in Lost Hearts in Italy. Explore the ways Mira, Zenin, Nick, and other characters are foreigners.
6) Zenin is a character who doesn’t lack material goods, women, family, or career success, yet he lives in “a dark world of things lacking.” What is missing from his life? Do you think it is possible for Zenin to ever be content?
7) Dreams make frequent appearances throughout Lost Hearts in Italy. What is their purpose, and what insight do they offer?
8) The second time Mira goes to meet Zenin, she “feels as if she has come to the center of her life, to the center of a wood in which all the leaves on the trees are eyes. Or to the hidden center, the secret heart she has been searching for in the labyrinth of Rome” (chapter 15). What is Mira’s epiphany here?
9) When Nick finds out about Mira’s infidelity, he states that she’s lost her country now. What does his statement mean? At what point does Mira go too far and render her marriage unsalvageable?
10) What is the significance of Roushana, the Bangladeshi woman in chapter 27? Compare and contrast her with the other women in the novel.
11) Nick has a theory that the more foreign places you live in, the less you absorb. Do you agree with his opinion? What have your traveling experiences been in relation to his statement?
12) How have Mira, Zenin, and Nick changed by the end of Lost Hearts in Italy, besides losing their naiveté? In what ways are they more content, and how do they remain unfulfilled?
ANDREA LEE was born in Philadelphia and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University. She is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, and her fiction and nonfiction writing have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. She is the author of Russian Journal, the novel Sarah Phillips, and the short story collection Interesting Women. She lives with her husband and two children in Turin, Italy.
ALSO BY ANDREA LEE
Russian Journal
Sarah Phillips
Interesting Women
Praise for Lost Hearts in Italy
“A premise worthy of Edith Wharton…A singularly stylish writer, Lee has carved out a niche for herself by taking on class, culture, sex—and matrimony—with a clear-eyed candor that can feel thrillingly transgressive.”
—Vogue
“Exquisite…This is an archetypal tale, but Lee sails it into new realms with her slicing insights into racial, cultural, sexual, and class divides; candid explications of the eroticism of wealth and revenge; and, most stunningly, resplendent descriptions of Italy’s transfixing beauty; haunting, blood-stained past; and steely knowingness. Each enrapturing scene shimmers with sensual, psychological, and historical nuance. Each encounter is choreographed with the deadly elegance and precision of a fencing match.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Lustrous, textured canniness…Lee’s prose shimmers so effectively.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Few writers can so swiftly evoke private, familial mythologies or cast a colder eye on the assured and entitled, American and European, black and white…. The drama in Lost Hearts in Italy is not one of revenge or comeuppance, but something more real. While it is not without wrenching scenes of power and passion, betrayal and bitterness, the truth that emerges is an adult one of acceptance. Lee is less interested in judgment or condemnation than in evoking something far more subtle: acceptance.”
—Newsday
“In chillingly urbane prose, Lee takes the full measure of her characters’s folly, as they prove faithless not only to each other but to themselves.”
—The New Yorker
“Elegantly structured…[Lee] powerfully orchestrates the clash of cultures and wills through the interweaving of her characters’s memories, which build in an emotional crescendo.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Features a protagonist who could aptly be described as an anti-heroine: the modern version of a classic Jamesian type, the American innocent abroad…One can’t help thinking of James’s Daisy Miller and the enticement of her own Rome sojourn…. An astringently probing look at the deep costs of shallowness and the perils of reckless innocence.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“With prose as elegant and sharp as a diamond scalpel, Lee examines why people wreck their present lives for motives they can never really explain.”
—The Seattle Times
“Lee has a talent for descriptive writing…. Pleasing and evocative.”
—The New York Times Book Review
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sp; “Spicy…a can’t-miss summer read…When you curl up with an Andrea Lee story, there are guarantees: You know you’ll get first-rate writing that won’t put you to sleep; you’re sure to learn a naughty phrase in Italian, Russian, or French; and you’re definitely going to meet savvy, stylish, globe-trotting sisters who have great careers and even greater sex.”
—Essence
“The portraits are incisive, the cultural insights fresh, and the deliquescent prose a pleasure to read…. Delicious.”
—Library Journal
“Reads like an uber-travelogue for sophisticates who read Vanity Fair and Vogue, who set great store by designer clothes, the very best food, luxury hotels and the insidious glamour of literature and history…in lush, lustful sentences of longing…[Italy is] passionately constructed for readers who can only dream of such richness.”
—The Washington Post
Lost Hearts in Italy is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Andrea N. Lee
Reading group guide copyright © 2006 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2006.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, for permission to reprint an excerpt from “A Map of Europe” from Collected Poems 1948–1984 by Derek Walcott, copyright © 1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lee, Andrea
Lost hearts in Italy: a novel / Andrea Lee.
p. cm.
1. Women authors—Fiction. 2. Americans—Italy—Fiction. 3. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.E324L67 2006
813'.54—dc22 2006040805
www.thereaderscircle.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-633-7
v3.0