Tenor of Love : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: The Great Caruso and the Three Women Who Idolized Him
Review: Author Mary di Michele treats the love life of tenor Enrico Caruso as a grand Verdi-esque opera full of epic gestures and over-the-top passion. It's not a bad approach considering how colorful a character the world-renowned singer apparently was. At times, her fictionalized biography feels more like a Harlequin romance one could easily call "A Love Song for Three Women". The novel's first narrator is Rina Giachetti, the seventeen-year-old girl who falls for the young tenor, who then loses him to her older sister Ada. It is with the help of singing lessons from Ada that Caruso wins the leading role of Rodolfo in Puccini's then-new opera "La Bohème". In spite of being a promising soprano herself, Ada goes on to bear Caruso's sons, but it is Rina who goes through self-sacrifice to help raise them. Caruso loves the Giachetti sisters, who come across as passionate and lustful characters in a Vittorio de Sica film. Because he doesn't trust the sisters, Caruso marries the dedicated and dowdy Dorothy Park Benjamin, the American whose loyalty endures beyond death.

Caruso's early demise is graphically portrayed in the book as if it was the final act in the opera where one ends up feeling sorry more for the three women who loved him. But di Michele does a good job of making Caruso come alive as larger-than-life whose destiny is to sing but whose foibles, sexual and otherwise, make him utterly human. At the end of the book, I still don't get a clear sense of what made Caruso so special as a performer despite di Michele's best efforts to capture his musical genius. But through the author's poetic writing style, what I do get is a strong sense of his personal charisma and the passions that seem to drive him to succeed. If you are looking for a good use of an opera singer in a dramatic setting, I would recommend Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto" before reading this book.