Written Script

Shakespeare and the afterlife (see above) also figure in a novel by playwright Marsigli that asks the question: Are our lives scripted ahead of time or is there truly a possibility of free will? Marsigli's answer is a formal but surprisingly engaging novel of ideas in the grand European tradition of Goethe and Mann. A kind of aristocratic everyman, Columbia University classics professor Ivain La Baille finds his life cut short, at age 30, when he is caught in a crossfire of terrorists at the airport. Yet 10 years later he reappears, as a Shakespearean actor no less, offered another chance to run through the script of his life--which is actually a floppy disk he is to carry around with him at all times. Has it already been programmed and is he merely providing ""new material"" for the Great Playwright himself, the so-called Father Godlet? Or is there a chance to alter events, (such as when La Baille plays Caesar on Broadway and refuses to allow the hero of his former life to die)? In exploring La Baille's life between his ancestral country estate in France and his apartment in New York City, between his beloved well-bred wife, France, who hastily remarried after his death, and Allegra, the beautiful temptress and fellow ""dead soul"" who has been sent to be his guide, Marsigli handles her weighty matters with a surprisingly light touch, patiently letting her tale unfold at its own speed. Despite unmemorable prose and rather cardboard characterizations (the too-virtuous wife, the rejected ""bad"" woman, the sly, toothless fortune-teller), there is much here to delight the thinking reader, and the scenes of country-house life in a French village alone will ensure a word-of-mouth readership among savvy Francophiles. (May)