★★★★★ A queer Venetian puppeteer

Eight Strings

Margaret DeRosia

The story begins with our hero and first-person narrator Franco freezing outside the Minerva Theater, the premiere puppet theater of late nineteenth century Venice. Until yesterday Franco was a girl, Francesca, living in the bad part of town with her beloved grandfather and her not-at-all-beloved drunk and indebted father. She has just learned that her father has sold her to a local mafioso to pay off his debts. She was ostensibly sold into marriage, but in reality she is to be kidnapped into what amounts to prostitution. Thus Francesca, at the urging of her grandfather, becomes Franco. It works. Her grandfather tells her, "No one looks twice. You’re more yourself as a boy, not less. They think you’re one of them, Francesca."

Franco barges into the Minerva and demands to be taken on as an apprentice to Radillo, the owner and master puppeteer of the theater. Franco (as Francesca) was taught by his grandfather to use the eight-string puppets that Radillo made famous. As his grandfather told him,

‘Eight strings are more complicated than those of the past. You can make puppets come to life with two or three, but that’s old-fashioned. With eight strings, people forget they’re watching wood. They’re seeing someone they know -- or if you’re really good, someone they’d want to know. Eight strings,’ he’d say, ‘and you have a soul.’

Then Annella, an old friend who knew Franco as Franscesca, shows up at the Minerva. She recognizes him and promises to keep his secret. (By the way, all these plot details are in the publisher's blurb, so I am not counting any of them as spoilers.) Franco and Annella become lovers. For the reader there is a constant feeling of life on a knife's edge. Will Annella betray Franco? Will he be discovered by someone else? It's a question of life and death.

Venice in 1896 is, as Margaret Derosia describes it, "an aging beauty past her prime, ... a once-powerful republic in decline". Its glory days long past, it is now just one city in the recently formed nation of Italy. It is a city that eats its children, especially its poor children. Derosia writes with a powerful sense of place. The reader is left with a visceral feel that the danger for Franco is real -- if he is discovered, he WILL die.

The evocation of the puppet theater is powerful. The best chapter in the book, in my opinion, is one describing a performance of Pinocchio in the Minerva. It is not just the puppets, but also the audience of children in the Pit shouting at the players what they think of the characters. This sense of puppet theater as dialog between the puppeteers and the audience in the Pit throughout the book is vivid and makes the theater come to life. A detail I was not previously aware of: when a character dies in a show, the puppeteer throws the holder and strings down on the stage, exposing the artifice of the puppet show, yet somehow making the death seem more real. It reminded me of a chess player knocking over the king to acknowledge the loss of a game.

The novel is followed by "A note to readers" that I quite enjoyed. It is more extensive than such notes generally are. In it Derosia describes the historical basis of the story and her understanding, as a self-described "queer lesbian", of Franco and his love story.

And this is a debut novel! Extraordinary.

I thank NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reader copy. This review expresses my honest opinions.

I read 236 books in 2022, and this was the best of them. Perhaps it could be your best book of this year.

Amazon review

Goodreads review