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The Pope's Rhinoceros, by Lawrence Norfolk
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The Pope's Rhinoceros is a vivid, antic, and picaresque novel spun around one of history's most bizarre chapters: the sixteenth-century attempt to procure a rhinoceros as a bribe for Pope Leo X. In February 1516, a Portuguese ship sank off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Senora de Ajuda had sailed fourteen thousand miles from the Indian kingdom of Gujarat. Her mission: to bribe the "pleasure-loving Pope" into favoring expansionist Portugal over her rival Spain with the most exotic and least likely of gifts -- a living rhinoceros. Moving from the herring colonies of the Baltic Sea to the West African rain forest, with a cast of characters including an order of reclusive monks and Rome's corrupt cardinals, courtesans, ambassadors, and nobles, The Pope's Rhinoceros is at once a fantastic adventure tale and a portrait of an age rushing headlong to its crisis.
- Sales Rank: #1401120 in eBooks
- Published on: 2007-12-01
- Released on: 2007-12-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
In the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco, Lawrence Norfolk has created a dizzyingly dense and impressively erudite fantasy of a novel, a vast edifice based around a single, actual historical event: the sinking off the coast of Italy of a Portugese ship bound on a bizarre mission, to deliver an African rhino to Pope Leo X. Norfolk takes his readers on a world tour of the 16th century, from the flophouses of Rome to the rain forest of West Africa, and along the way he piles historical esoterica upon philosophical rumination upon myriad subplots and minor characters. The chains of event and coincidence and the encyclopedic references will exhaust some readers long before the mad quest for the rhino meets its watery end, but Norfolk's baroque talent remains inexhaustible.
From Publishers Weekly
Set in the 16th century, Norfolk's epic second novel takes its premise from an actual event: an unsuccessful Portuguese attempt to bring a rhinoceros to Rome by ship, in order to curry political favor with Pope Leo X. But historical fact is no more than a springboard for Norfolk's extremely (perhaps excessively) elaborate and occasionally mythic fictional construction. At the novel's center is Salvestro, a somewhat reluctant soldier of fortune who becomes a steadfast companion to Bernardo, a dim-witted hulk with fearsome physical strength. After they have been used as pawns in a maze of machinations and deceptions within the Italian military, the pair escape back to Salvestro's Baltic home town; but soon afterward, they return to Italy as guides for a group of beleaguered monks. In Rome, Salvestro and Bernardo become mixed up in the attempt to procure the exotic rhinoceros, undertaking a perilous sea voyage that deposits them on an equally perilous African coast. While some may enjoy Norfolk's whirligig of deceptions and double crosses, less patient readers will find the narrative frustrating. Norfolk indulges a penchant for withholding information, and his vaguely delineated, staggeringly complex plot twists involve a huge cast of characters. As he proved in the intellectually heavyweight Lempriere's Dictionary, he's clearly a virtuoso stylist. But in the end, this novel, more a tour de force of technical mastery than a compelling narrative, impresses more than it entertains.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Pope Leo X was one of the most power-hungry and profligate political figures of the Renaissance. Raised in the lavish Medici court, he was a difficult person to impress. Expansionist Portugal hoped to win Leo's favor by presenting him with a rhinoceros, a creature about as exotic as a unicorn in 16th-century Italy. Norfolk's second historical novel, following the critically acclaimed Lempriere's Dictionary (LJ 6/15/92), focuses on the adventures of Salvestro and Bernardo, two clueless treasure hunters who get caught up in the rhino quest. There are scores of minor characters, including Fiametta, an obscenely obese prostitute; Towser the Executioner; a Vatican housecat; and the virgin Amalia, whose white dress is impervious to Roman dirt. Pychonesque anachronisms abound: the Roman countryside is an "ectopia," and music at papal celebrations is provided by the proto-punk band King Caspar and the Mauritians. Despite its postmodern trappings, this is essentially an old-fashioned and aimless picaresque novel. For larger fiction collections.?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Read This Book To Make Yoursef A Better Person
By True Power
To learn. To make money. To be aware of obligations, like taxes and contracts. To be entertained. To better understand things, like politics, history, and religion. To expand vocabulary. To become a better conversationalist and speaker. To travel. To be in a different time and place. To experience emotions and adventure. To explore. To discover. To simply provoke thought. To get ideas. To satisfy curiosity. To lead a better life. These are a few of the reasons we read. The Pope's Rhinoceros will satisfy these desires, and more.
The saddest things about my personal experience with this historical novel are how and why I discovered it. It was a library discard in excellent condition, purchased for 25 cents because of poor circulation. The best thing is that I did discover it.
The most joyful experience: I benefit from the discovery, like purchasing a Rembrandt at a garage sale. Having read it, I'll selectively pass it along to others with a passion for quality and learning.
Raised with C.S. Forester, nourished by Patrick O'Brian, I was delighted to find a bit of 16th century sailing ship adventure.
As a student of history, I checked "facts" from other resources. There really was an attempt to present the gift of a rhinoceros to Pope Leo early in the sixteenth century. It really had been over 1500 years since a rhinoceros had been seen in Europe, courtesy of the power of the Roman Empire. Why? Did civilization decline? Might it again? Is it doing so now?
Keep a dictionary handy while you read this work. Although not doing so will not diminish your progress nor enjoyment, this book offers an enormous opportunity to expand your historical, geographical, and foreign terms vocabulary. It will simultaneously increase your admiration for the relatively young author, Lawrence Norfolk.
Get a copy. Put it on the night stand or headboard shelf. Read at your own pace. Discuss it with your family and friends when opportunity avails.
You will travel in time and place. You will become cold and you will be warmed. You will witness starvation and gluttony, feel fear and elation, cruelty and kindness, greed and sacrifice. You will meet beggars, thieves, bums, sluts, charlatans, crooks, connivers, slaves, overseers, murderers, impoverished, drunkards, defeated, deceitful, indigent, indignant, and indigenous. You will meet persons who are faithful, loyal, saintly, spiritual, psychic, blind who see or do not, pirates, sailors, soldiers, captains, overseers, royalty, monks, priests, cardinals, a pope, poets, innkeepers, and many more. You will do so in Europe, Africa, and India. You will be in the dawning decades of the sixteenth century.
You will enjoy the experience immensely. You will have done a good thing. You will be better for it. Exercise builds the body. I sincerely recommend this book as a worthwile endeavour. It will build the mind.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
The Pope's Rhinoceros...
By M. Tehrani
I started reading Lawrence Norfolk's second Novel on a flight from London to Houston in early April 2004. I finished it on July 18. The last book that took me as long to read was Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses". Both books are fascinating, but at times immensely tedious. I intend to read both again after I retire!
I found the style of the book descriptive in the extreme. This worked in some instances, like the description of the rainforest somewhere in Goa?/Africa?, but often was at the expense of good story telling and a cohesive narative. The reader is very likely to lose sense of times, places, events and characters as some of the naration is actually a parade of memories taking place inside some character's mind. As a result, the reader might read a whole chapter without having any sense of time, place, event, etc.
As has been said by others, the ending was rushed and was in no way in proportion to the less improtant but extremely verbose descriptions given elsewhere.
Some of the likeable characters were treated unsympathetically. For example, can someone tell me what happened to Bernardo whose fortunes we followed in detail most of the way, but who suddenly disappeared without any fuss.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Absolute Brilliance!
By Eric Fick
Lawrence Norfolk is one of the only modern masters of language and storytelling we have, and I believe that we should not only appreciate it but praise it as well. As with his first novel "Lepmpriere's Dictionary", which was a story of strange twisting plots and a great reservoir for historical mystery, "The Pope's Rhinoceros" is only the best book to follow. It of course has its strange tangents that we, as an audience, are learning to be the style of the great author, and minor plots that boggle the mind even after the last page has been read. There are things too reminiscent of Lempriere's such as the character of Septimus whom we are so intrigued by but so uninformed about, we get a new view on this angelic character and only find that we are closer to understanding without even a new hint as to what it means. His, Norfolk's, ability to write so detailed on certain things as the way of life of a fish in the sea, a colony of rats, or the history of a river or strange occurrences on remote islands, is impeccable. To achieve through writing alone, an enchantment that will devour your reader, without even the elements of a story is not an easy task and yet Norfolk produces it in the blink of an eye, and makes it appear all too natural. I think anyone would terribly enjoy this book, and those who would not are just those who become aggrivated when a piece of work forces them to think a little. The only negative of the book that I can even fathom is that he has so few books under his belt that when you finish Lempriere's and the Pope's who will be left waiting impatienly, clawing at and climbing the walls, for his next work to be published.
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