This book has all the elements of a standard chick-lit novel: a young twenty-something Montreal woman on vacation in Tuscany, an older (maybe thirty-something?) attractive Italian man with a now-empty childhood home that’s just asking to be renovated and decorated, his mother who spends her time in the kitchen making culinary expressions of joy and familial ties, a village of quirky characters to be won over, and a couple of dogs ready to be fallen in love with.

Yet, The Perfect Circle is far from what you would expect given that list of ingredients. Instead, we’re thrown into a world of overwhelming, depressing, obsessive love that leaves Marianne isolated and lost rather than fulfilled and energized.

The power of this book is Pascale Quiviger’s lyrical writing style that comes across through Sheila Fischman’s masterful translation. In fact, there were times when it reminded me of another Fischman translation of a Quebec classic, Next Episode by Hubert Aquin. Her descriptions and commentary are insightful and demand contemplation: “Recollection is something like that scaffolding, memory is like the restored fresco: it’s the new skin applied to the past in order to bear its disappearance which is always, in the end, our own. [...] Eternity is the fact that once a fresco has been sunk into the wall and once the wall has eroded to the ground, it is still intact and close to me, despite my ignorance of them, despite my absence.”

“Marco’s country belongs to a handful of citizens, but it’s also the country of everyone,” Quiviger writes–and accurately too–I felt just that way when I stepped off the plane the first time I travelled to Rome. But Marianne finds she can’t abide there waiting in a kind of limbo for Marco to pay her sporadic attention.

This book was well-written, though rather heavy. I love Italy and I love love, so I think I might have preferred A Perfect Circle to have been written as that light, uplifting chick-lit book, with Marco and Marianne dividing their time between Quebec and Tuscany, with Marco’s village and family coming to adopt the Canadese traveller as one of their own…you know the story.