The Tower of Benito
A novelist imagines II Duce building
the ultimate monument?to himself.
BY DIANE COLE
The Eighth Wonder of the World
By Leslie Epstein
Handsel Books, $24.95
Imagine a brilliant American architect whose life
story reads like a scandal sheet ripped from the biographies
of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ezra Pound. Endow this character
with the fatuous arrogance of Percy Shelley's
Ozymandias, king of kings, and an oddball humor that
crosses the antic punning of Groucho Marx with the
hayseed sensibility of Will Rogers. (For starters,
there's "Il Doozy" for Il Duce, "Mice
Vender Rolls" for Mies van der Rohe, and "Grope-your-ass"
for Gropius.)
Next, plunk him down in the middle of Fascist Italy,
introduce him to Benito Mussolini, and set in motion
a scheme to build a monument that outstrips even the
excesses of Adolf Hitler's infamous architect
Albert Speer.
Amos Prince is the colossus who bestrides the pages
of Leslie Epstein's absorbing new novel, The Eighth
Wonder of the World. Like Wright, the fictional
Prince has pursued numerous love affairs and suffered
the tragic death of two young children in the criminal
arson of his bucolic studio-home. Like the pro-Fascist,
anti-Semitic Pound, Prince finds a haven in Mussolini's
Italy, where he commits treason in the form of anti-American
radio broadcasts and, after the war, eludes prison
through an extended stay in St. Elizabeths Hospital.
But unlike either real-life character, Prince wins
a commission from Mussolini to build an improbably
soaring mile-high tower, dubbed La Vittoria, to commemorate
the conquest of Ethiopia. Is such an engineering feat
even possible? Prince's worshipful assistant, the
assimilated Jew Max Shabilian, so preoccupies himself
with finding the right building materials and mathematical
ratios to execute this architectural coup that he
becomes blind to the project's political intent and
participates in such dubious celebrations as a champagne
party with Il Duce and Hitler's high command aboard
the Hindenburg.
Only when he awakens to the plight of Italy's Jews
(not to mention his own perilous position) does Shabilian
attempt to devise a Schindler's List-like work
force for La Vittoria?ostensibly to bring the building
to completion, really to save as many Jews as possible.
In his own mad obsession, Shabilian reconceives Prince
as Pharaoh, La Vittoria as a modern-day pyramid, and
himself as Moses.
Epstein?director of the creative writing program
at Boston University?is best known for a previous
novel, King of the Jews, set in Poland during
the Holocaust. There, as in The Eighth Wonder of
the World, Epstein uses broad strokes of comic
pastiche to emphasize the absurd grandiosity of characters
whose exercises in narcissism play out against the
grim crescendo of World War II and the Holocaust.
The impact is at first disorienting: rather than villains,
historical characters like Speer and Mussolini come
across as operatic oafs. By novel's end, though, the
circuslike entourage over which the dictatorial Prince
presides more closely resembles an inferno.
Epstein vividly captures the spectacle of Fascist
Italy, describing grand parades choreographed like
a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza. But oddly missing
from Epstein's panorama is a feeling for architecture
itself. We never are made to see the revolutionary
buildings that brought Prince his fame and glory?they
are described only in passing?and La Vittoria
looms more as abstract symbol than monument under
construction.
Because it is Prince's mad hubris that interests
Epstein, not his originality as an architect, we must
take it on faith that Prince really does (or did)
possess artistic genius at a world-class level. Too
bad, because if only Epstein had succeeded in showing
us that, too, what a wonder this novel would be.
Diane Cole is a contributing editor of U.S.
News & World Report and author of After
Great Pain: A New Life Emerges.
In 1998, the Trust placed the historic courthouses
of Texas on its list of America's 11 Most Endangered
Historic Places. The Lone Star State's impressive
array of 200-odd county courthouses?built from
the 1850s through the 1940s, in styles ranging from
Second Empire to Greek revival to moderne?were
deteriorating because of inadequate upkeep. Now, with
hundreds of millions of dollars steered to them via
the Texas Historic Courthouse Preservation Program
(a partner of the Trust's Save America's
Treasures and Main Street programs), many of these
buildings have regained their original luster.
One hundred of the finest are featured
in Michael Andrews' new book, Historic
Texas Courthouses (Bright
Sky Press, $49.95). Andrews, a former U.S. congressman
from Texas and erstwhile member of the Trust's
board of trustees, sums up every courthouse's notable
architectural features and offers a verbal "snapshot"?a
quotation or sketch?that evokes the historical
significance of each one. Stunning color photographs
by Paul Hester and Lisa Hardaway show off the buildings'
clock towers, arches, carvings, and other embellishments
to great advantage.
What strikes even a casual
reader is the variety of styles represented: the modest,
pink adobe Spanish colonial revival courthouse in
Sierra Blanca (Hudspeth County) was constructed in
1920, shortly after the Nueces County Courthouse,
a grand, six-story interpretation of an Ionic temple.
Sleek moderne courthouses (like Knox County's)
contrast sharply with ornate Richardsonian-Romanesque
wedding cakes (such as James Riely Gordon's masterpiece
in Waxahachie, Ellis County).
This book is packed with enough "visual knockouts"?in
the words of Trust president Richard Moe, who wrote
the book's introduction?to delight lovers of old buildings
in Texas and beyond.
? Lawrence Hurley
A longtime advocate of preserving southeastern Utah's
Escalante basin as a wilderness, Brooke Williams has
repeatedly heard the refrain "There's nothing
out there" from oil company executives, lawmakers,
and tourists alike. But for him, that's exactly
the point. Nothingness, he argues, is not a "void
to be filled by the slightest external pressure. Nothing
refers to ‘no-thing' and is the opposite
of things, which have taken over our modern lives."
Escalante: The Best Kind
of Nothing (University of Arizona Press,
$14.95) is his attempt to capture the experience of
being in Escalante. From his first trip as a college
student in 1973 to later visits in middle age, the
book records his meditations on wilderness, life,
and the human experience.
A hike through Moody Loop with a group of friends
diverse enough to be "running a small town"
inspires reflections on how financial security has
become the modern definition of survival, stifling
our need to explore the environment. Rock art along
the hike to Calf Creek Falls inspires thoughts of
how ancestral memory might be recorded in the landscape
and of modern man's relationship to his surroundings.
Accompanying Williams' recollections is a series
of striking black-and-white photographs by Chris Noble
that capture the emptiness of the desert landscape
while emphasizing its subtle textures and dramatic
lines.
Though Williams briefly recounts his involvement with
the long efforts to protect Escalante, culminating
in the creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument in 1996, he does not delve into the politics
of preservation. Rather, he speaks of Escalante's
personal significance to him and of the value of such
places to the human soul. Its beauty, emptiness, silence,
and darkness are commodities, in his mind, just as
valuable as anything that could be extracted from
the land.
? Stephanie Joy Smith
Read more excerpts from our current
issue online, look for Preservation on
newsstands, e-mail
us to purchase a copy, or subscribe
to the magazine.
|
