In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature

In this volume Chistopher Woodward examines the inspiration that ruins have been throughout the centuries, and while In Ruins is not riveting from first page to last, it contains enough that is compelling that one excuses the sections which seem like mere catalogs: Henry James said this about Roman ruins, and Poe said that, and Chateaubriand said . . . . One feels, at times, that if the book had a clearer argument these discrete items would better cohere. Then, however, one forgives all when one reads the author's account of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. We learn that: "In the years after the war he would leave Via Butera for breakfast at Pasticceria del Massimo, where he would eat pastries and read for four hours--enough time for a Balzac novel. Then he visited the bookseller Flaccovio. His bulky leather bag, full of books and cream cakes, was always at his side. He never left the house without a copy of Shakespeare . . . and Flaccovio once glimpsed Proust nestling in courgettes. In the afternoon he joined a table of local intellectuals at Cafe Cafliscsh, silent but for the occasional monosyllabic retort. . . . After many years of this routine Lampedusa was overweight, pale and one of the best-read men in Europe."