In the second book, “ In the Company of the Courtesan,” a prostitute and a dwarf flee sixteenth-century Rome for the glitz and grit of Venice. Dunant makes their strangeness just vivid enough to pull us along with an uncanny fascination. They are dressed differently, suffer differently, die differently. In her historical fiction, bodies help bring the past to visceral life, but they also help keep the story at a remove-these bodies are different from ours, Dunant’s twenty-first-century readers’. At the point where the snake’s body became its head, instead of the reptilian skull was the softer, rounder shape of a man’s face: the head thrown back, the eyes closed as if in rapture and the tongue, snake-long still, darting out from his mouth downward toward the opening of Sister Lucrezia’s sex.īodies are where Dunant has her fun in the books, betraying her origins as a crime writer (see the Hannah Wolfe series). Age had defoliated what would once have been a thicket of pubic hair into a straggle of wiry curls, so that what would have been invisible save to the most insistent seeker was now made plain.
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