Lost Hearts in Italy
Andrea Lee, 2006
Random House
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812971132
Summary
The Italian phrase Mai due senza tre–“never two without three”–forms the basis of Andrea Lee’s spellbinding novel of betrayal. Sophisticated and richly told, Lost Hearts in Italy reveals a trio caught in the grip of desire, deception, and remorse.
When Mira Ward, an American, relocates to Rome with her husband, Nick, she looks forward to a time of exploration and awakening. Young, beautiful, and in love, Mira is on the verge of a writing career, and giddy with the prospect of living abroad.
On the trip over, Mira meets Zenin, an older Italian billionaire, who intrigues Mira with his coolness and worldly mystique. A few weeks later, feeling idle and adrift in her new life, Mira agrees to a seemingly innocent lunch with Zenin and is soon catapulted into an intense affair, which moves beyond her control more quickly than she intends.
Her job as a travel writer allows clandestine trysts and opulent getaways with Zenin to Paris, Monte Carlo, London, and Venice, and over the next few years, now the mother of a baby daughter, she struggles between resisting and relenting to this man who has such a hold on her. As her marriage erodes, so too does Mira’s sense of self, until she no longer resembles the free spirit she was on her arrival in the Eternal City.
Years later, Mira and Nick, now divorced and remarried to others, look back in an attempt to understand their history, while a detached Zenin assesses his own life and his role in the unlikely love triangle. Each recounts the past, aided by those witness to their failure and fallout.
An elegant, raw, and emotionally charged read, Lost Hearts in Italy is a classic coming-of-age story in which cultures collide, innocence dissolves, and those we know most intimately remain foreign to us. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth— N/A
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Turin, Italy
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 has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine and 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. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The fall from innocence of Americans abroad is a Jamesian theme, but here the Grand Tour has been replaced by international finance and the naïfs are married Harvard grads, posted to Rome. The husband, the scion of a shabby but genteel New England clan, disdains his Wasp heritage and worships his black wife; she is drawn to a predatory Italian, a “peasant” who has bullied his way to the helm of a corporate empire. The adultery plays out in first-class airport lounges and ornate hotel rooms, and Rome reprises its traditional role as the city of dissolution, “rich and coarse at the same time, like a mixture of sackcloth and brocade.” In chillingly urbane prose, Lee takes the full measure of her characters’ folly, as they prove faithless not only to each other but to themselves.
The New Yorker
Two handsome young Americans marry, move to Rome, and pursue interesting careers while having a daughter. The wife, Mira, also pursues an enigmatic affair with coarse and calculating upstart Zenin, a toy-manufacturing billionaire. As readers know from page one, the marriage has failed painfully, with Mira having gone on to marry an Italian named Vanni and given birth to two sons. Meanwhile, embittered ex-husband Nick lives in London with his new wife and their two daughters. Because Mira is African American and Nick old-line (if not rich) New England, the failure of their relationship also seems like a failure of ideals. The novel treads between the 1980s and the mid-2000s, as Mira and Nick's daughter heads to Harvard, alma mater of her parents. The portraits are incisive, the cultural insights fresh, and the deliquescent prose a pleasure to read, yet the novel can seem static. With so much foretold, there's little sense of revelation, and though one can applaud Lee (Russian Journal) for her restrained approach, what reasons seem to surface for Mira's deserting Nick just don't add up for this reviewer. One can't turn down Lee's first novel in 20 years, but if delicious it's still a puzzle. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
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 and 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” (40). What motivation lies behind her action, and what effect does it have on both of them? What emotions are Mira grappling with?
3. 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” (40). What motivation lies behind her action, and what effect does it have on both of them? What emotions are Mira grappling with?
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 in 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 shed?
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” (116). 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? What do you think is the point when Mira has gone too far for her marriage to remain salvageable?
10. What is the significance of the Bangladesh woman, Roushana, 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 this 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 naivete? In which ways are they more content, and how do they remain unfulfilled?
(Questions issued by publisher.)