Knife Party at the Hotel Europa

In this collection of linked short stories, Jarman (19 Knives) creates a dizzyingly vivid world, layering impressions of present-day Italy, with its tourists and churches and parties, with musings on its antique past and memories of the narrator%E2%80%99s more mundane life in Canada. The unnamed protagonist spends a summer in Italy, traveling from Rome to Naples and Pompeii and back again. Alone after a recent divorce, feeling disconnected from his old life, he meditates%E2%80%94and sometimes broods%E2%80%94on past and present loves, and what it means to feel abandoned and lonely in a teeming landscape. Jarman%E2%80%99s stream-of-consciousness prose circles and sweeps across encounters with hip young Italians, a man bleeding to death in the hallway after a party, romantic moonlit excursions interrupted by the corpses of refugees washing up on the beach, mysterious holy statues that transform at night into a gang of restaurant grease thieves, and the tragic end of a modern Icarus falling from a cliff. Jarman%E2%80%99s stories are exquisite and powerful, finding beauty even within pain. They demand to be read again and again. (Mar.)