What Are You Reading in Rome?

I am currently spending a year on fellowship at the preposterously resplendent American Academy in Rome. In between exploring this city, doing my own writing, and failing to learn Italian, I've been reading quite a bit. The first book I finished here was Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in
Burma, which is both a travelogue of one of the world's last orthodox police states and an impressive piece of literary detective work. Larkin (a
pseudonym) travels to many of the places Orwell worked as an imperial
policeman while in his early twenties to see how Burma has (and has not)
changed.

The people of Burma (today known as Myanmar) have a wonderful joke
at their own expense: Q. What are the three great books Orwell wrote about
Burma? A. Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and 1984.

I also recently finished, in galley form, Richard Powers's new novel The Echo Maker, about a Nebraskan woman caring for her brain-damaged brother. It has all the Powers hallmarks--riffs on technology, explorations of human consciousness, startling prose (Powers is among the best metaphorists we have)--and while I don't think it is quite at the level of earlier Powers novels such as The Goldbug Variations or Galatea 2.2, it is still a stunning read.

For my own education, I'm reading R. J. B. Bosworth's Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945--totally gripping and mindblowingly researched. One really interesting thing about Italy is how it has coped with its fascist history. A good deal of the old fascist architecture in
Rome is still standing, and Mussolini's deranged granddaughter has a table
setting in Italian politics today. Hard to imagine how, say, someone named
Heidi Hitler could have any role in German politics. Bosworth describes how
the people of Italy--probably the most freewheeling to have ever endured
fascism--managed to remain peculiarly Italian during and after their
experiment with the twentieth century's most disastrous form of government.

Finally, I am reading in manuscript a novel by a friend, John Beckman. I had
the pleasure of editing John's first novel, the superlative Winter Zoo, and
volunteered greedily to have a look at his next novel before it went out to
publishers. Its title is Justine. I won't spoil the plot other than to say
it involves a young French woman, the Marquis de Sade, and Walt Disney. This
book is a buffet of astonishments, not to mention among the most convincing
novels written in a woman's voice by man I have ever read, and I am deeply
envious of John's next editor.--Tom Bissell