Members were delighted with this book, saying it was their favourite of the books we have read over the years and that they would read it a second time. We talked for a long time about the love and support of friends and community which is at the heart of this book.
There is a host of quirky human characters to love and enjoy - including Ulysses (Temps), Evelyn, Cressy, Alys (the Kid), Peg, Col, Ginny, Pete, Massimo, Guilia, Paolo, the Contessa ... and there are also non-human characters - Claude the parrot, the cherry tree in London and the citrus tree in Florence, which offer wit and wisdom along the way. The conversations are often very funny and there are a number of laugh out loud moments in the events that unfold over several decades.
The story starts in 1944 during the Second World War in Florence when Evelyn Skinner and Margaret, her female companion (it's complicated), take refuge from the war in a villa in Tuscany. The much older Evelyn meets a British soldier in his 20s named Ulysses Temper (Temps to his friends) and asks to be taken to the head of the Allied Forces as she is keen to help them find and protect precious artworks in the region.
Ulysses takes her to meet his commander, the dashing Captain Darnley, who also loves art, and in an abandoned wine cellar they view a recovered altarpiece, The Deposition of the Cross by Pontormo (1528) before enemy bombing begins nearby. They manage to survive the shelling and Ulysses and Evelyn go their separate ways with a powerful memory of the meeting. We follow Temps and Evelyn's post-war lives over several decades as they circle around each other, nearly meeting several times.
Temps inherits a large house in Florence from an Italian soldier he has saved from a suicide attempt during the war and moves there from London with the young daughter of his former wife, Peg (it's complicated), to give her a more stable life, together with his grandfatherly older friend, Cressy, and the Brazilian parrot, Claude, who had been living at the bar where Temps was working. (The bar is owned by Col who doesn't get on well with the parrot, or indeed, anything much.)
The house in Florence turns out to be so big that Ulysses and Cressy decide to turn the first floor into a pensione for tourists. Massimo, the lawyer who was the executor of the will, helps them set up their new Italian life and becomes a firm friend.
A series of small and large dramas, tragedies and comedies follow with the friends in Florence and those left in England who visit irregularly. Apart from raising Alys, Temps begins making hand- made delicate historical globes, like his father. Cressy's world expands with reading poetry and dating an Italian woman. Alys, as a young teenager, develops a passion for art and music, discovers with confidence she loves a young woman, and happens to meet Evelyn who is now an art history teacher and visiting Florence with her girlfriend, Dotty. Evelyn travels to Florence several times but keeps just missing meeting up with Ulysses again.
Alys goes to London to work in Col's bar and study art where she attends one of Evelyn's art history lectures. But it is not until 1966, when the river Arno floods and 'mud angels' from all over the world rush to Florence to try to save lives, homes and the city's precious artworks, that Evelyn and Ulysses finally meet up again.
This is a book to enjoy that not only celebrates all kinds of love - familial, romantic, platonic, unconditional, love of a parrot, nature, food and drink - it also rejoices in a love of poetry and, of course, Florentine art and architecture.
Who is Sarah Winman?
English author Sarah Winman, 58, grew up in Essex and now lives in London. She studied at the Weber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art to become an actress, appearing in theatre, film and television (including Midsomer Murders).
She gave away acting to write. Her first novel, When God Was a Rabbit, was published in 2011 and was an international bestseller. It tells the story of a single family across four decades and the strange and wonderful events which shape them. It won various awards including New Writer of the Year in the Galaxy National Book Awards.
She then wrote A Year of Marvellous Ways which was also a bestseller, followed by Tin Man which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award in 2018.
Still Life was published in 2021 at a time when COVID meant long periods of isolation indoors (she wrote it in bed). However, she says she was thinking about Brexit not COVID at the time, creating a love letter to Italy with English characters whose lives and minds open up after crossing the channel and experiencing life in Florence.
Winman is a LGBTQ writer and her book also pays homage to EM Forster, particularly his book, A Room with a View, which captures Italy's liberating effects on the human heart. Winman reflected that Forster as a gay man did not have the freedom to write a book such as Still Life in his own lifetime.
Forster is actually a character in the book who meets one of the main female characters, Evelyn Skinner, as a young woman of 21 who is travelling 'unchaperoned' in Italy. She has a 'room with a view' at the same pensione that Forster is staying at with his mother.
They are both appalled by the staid British guests at the hotel who have nothing good to say about Italy. Evelyn understands Forster may be gay and offers him encouragement to be confident, escape small mindedness and his mother and seek adventure, as she has done, saying "You'll do here, Mr Forster, ten times over”.
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