After Hannibal

Barry Unsworth

This is the first one of Unsworth I picked up and I must say I found it a funny little book.

It's about a couple of people living on a hillslope in Tuscany. An Italian peasant family down the hill who want to make some money from a fallen down wall, alleged to have crumbled because of the construction work the English couple higher up the hill had done. The English couple a rather annoying husband and his timide wife. A middleaged American couple who decided to enjoy each other and the Italian renaissance art after their pension, they are having their house renovated through an English intermediate who allmost bankrupts them. An Italian history professor who's wife has left him after years of marriage for her lover. An Italian gay couple an older guy with his boytoy which ofcourse leaves him. And a german guy who still tries to make ammends with the past of his father (a nazi officer in Italy during the war).

All these characters one way or the other are getting in contact with a very clever lawyer he and the hill they live on are the red lines through the story.

It's more that Unsworth lifted up a couple of weeks in the lives of these people, some stories are told and have an ending some don't. A very readable book, with humour. Almost everything goes wrong in the book but the "good" guys end up reasonably well.