Ponte Santa Trinita

A beautifully written book. Very polished. The first person works works really well here. It adds impact and drama. You took my right into the time period. I loved the sensuality of the blindfolded scuptor scene. Lots of find detail so well described. Well deserved desk winner! Five stars. Candy

Violet, I love the quality of your work. Your style reminds me at times of WG Sebald and Helen Dunmore - Sebald particularly when we are with the sculptor and his search for identity in melancholy circles that defy linear narrative, and Dunmore for the sensuality of your prose - the touch, smell, taste and sound of everything is minted freshly, rich with visual detail that makes it difficult to believe that you were not actually there at that time. It would seem that you aren't looking for shelf space as this has already been to the desk? So here are my 6 stars and congratulations. Oh, and one typo 'a contemptuous harsh tone' rather than 'contemptible', I think you mean? best wishes, Frances.

I backed this book and gave it five stars. A first for me. Clearly then, I enjoyed it. The time slip was a little difficult at first because of the inability to flick back and forwards through pages easily. I also questioned the blindfold and photographic memory of hands but the writing was beautiful. Good luck.

Hi, I am new to this and simply a reader at the moment, I stumbled across a really funny sharply written new chick lit called 'Miss Match.com' and thought - wow the standard must be really high - so I dipped into the top five to see the the 'best' and was sorely disappointed with the top three then I read yours. I was impressed by your opening, you managed to pull the reader in , naturally the present tense adds immediacy and this helps and I liked your characters and your dialogue is believable, I am looking forward to reading on. You have restored my faith in writing,(on this site) I am notoriously hard to please and have books littered all over that I have started and left. I wish you all the best for your book. Anne

I read this a year ago or so when it was called Bloodlines and I didn't like it - I think it was your use if present tense that really put me off. I think I must have grown older because I've read three chapters and enjoyed it very much. I don't think there's any point in giving you constructive feedback now or anything like that, but I'm going to try and read to the end so I can understand the HC review. I hope it goes well for you and I wish I had the sense to back this at the time.

Joe

Hello Violet,this is your favourite Glaswegian football manager speaking,would you be very kind and have a look at the first chapter of my book 'A Buccaneer'(completed between crucifixions in the Scottish press)',Its a17th century historical,adventure/romance novel featuring Pirates,lost love,Cambridge University,the Great Plague of London,duelling in the Armee of Louis XIV,Beautiful French and Spanish Ladies,boots of Spanish Leather,the attack on Panama and much more,hope you are well and that your book is flourishing,with best wishes,Strachan Gordon

I just completed all 8 chapters and I can see why this is so popular! Of course I am the perfect audience for this book as I lived back then and lived through WWII - but you have quite possibly got here what Delaney describes as ...the best book here... it's the reason I took a gander and I now you reached the pinackle here so youy don't necessarily need my vote but let me know WHEN this is published. If I had this book in hand I'd not even hav ewritten this but would continue reading. I adore Felix and his mum, when she lets him out of school and moves him to Florence for a three week trial I fall in love with her. Then theres the diary and the code and youve left me hanging - what is the connection here?? Excellent writing - had I bought the book for $29.95 I'd have been convinced it was money well spent! Fondly, Henry

I love this and have read all that's posted. The third person POV with Zinnia and Felix and the 1st person with her father? works well. Your writing is smooth and polished and the premise is intriguing. Please let me know if you post more.

Where there are familiy secrets there are usually lies. True to history, this brilliantly evoked atmosphere of war contrasted against the evil of fascist Italy and played out in Florence with its artistic treasures and architecture captivates the reader. A haunting character is the dancer Guilianna whose beauty captivates the sculptor and fosters his infatuation, lust and ultimately love. Her transitions from youth to maturity are poignantly observed in her lover's reflections and scenes of her performances verging on the tragic. Exceptional too is the author's eye for detail transmuted to acute description of wartime chaos and its reflected lacerated human emotions. The 6 Chapters posted indicate a novel where the obvious quality of writing is bound to determine the very best elements of the genre ensuring an eminent commercial prospect. Backed.

Both a moving and intriguing start. Moving especially, yet Zinnia's initial reaction to her father's death is numb almost to the point of indifference and Felix's without grief though he pays lip-service to it knowing it to be special. Perhaps it's something to do with the line, 'You'll never see him ever,ever, ever again.' It's the repetition that makes it seem infinite and brings it home. Shakespeare repeats 'never' five times at the death of Cordelia in King Lear.
Have read only the first chapter but it's late so will continue tomorrow. Back it now. Exceptional.

With all the style of the best literary novelists, you evoke the both world of present loss and a world that is ripped straight out of the finest of Italian art films - Cinema Paradiso or Il Postino. The prose begs to be read and tasted as poetry: "She was curled up inside his smell"; "ruffled up into jaunty tufts" and "The streets swarmed with uniformed men who believed themselves taller than they were." The sculptor in Florence is so finely written, so deceptively understated in bringing a view of that wartime city to life, that, well, words fail me. It is exquisite work. The putting up of the wooden slats over the Fra Angelicos and the piles of metallic anything in the piazza were among the most poignant and powerful wartime images I have ever encoutered.

However, reading this on screen is no substitute for the real pleasure that will be mine when this finds a publisher...because there is no doubt that a novel of such liquid prose and evocative imagery, as well as the secrets within the secrets here, will find an agent or publisher who recognises it for the fine work it is. And I shall be watching out for it. Best - PB

This is responding to your message - I'm a beginner you know,i'm just beginning to find my way around the Labyrinth.This is not the right section.I assume you are being facetious when you appear to suggest that i am the football manager,Gordon Strachan,which of course is not really at all the same name as Strachan Gordon,so to answer your question i am not a completely incomprehensible Glaswegian,who doesn't appear to think of anything else but spherical objects existing eternally in dynamic velocity ....er.

A very interesting historical milieu :Italy in the latter stages of the 2ndWW,infested not only with Nazis but also fascist remnants.The description of the dead father is powerful,partly because it appears to come out of a sense of personal,intimate experience.I agree that perhaps the dialogue sequences would benefit from being broken up with prose,also there is occasional awkwardness of phrasing such as 'succession of expressions'which could be weeded out.I personally think the love scene should be more earthy,describing actual sexual feelings,but that is a matter of personal preference.This is a writer with skill and unbrtusive intensity.

Ponte Santa Trinita is my absolute favourite of the top five. Beautifully written.
JBC

Authonomists. This is how it's done (writing, that is).

Gorgeous writing & after five chapters I'm hooked. Though it might not for everyone, the juxtaposition of two such different writing styles - the quasi-elegaic and the staccato - works for me. The only thing I'd say is that, for me at least, the long periods of dialogue might need a little breaking up. A snatch of internal monologue, a quick nod to surroundings, a reminder of who's talking - just something to keep the reader rooted without detracting from the snappiness.

A silly thing but in chap 1 'male order' pulled me up because it sounds like - well, mail order.

I've put PST on my shelf & hope it makes it back to the desk.

Angela

I have spent yesterday and today reading on here and decided to choose a book from the top 10 - I found yours to be the most eloquent, poetic and pleasing. It inspires in me the necessity to improve my own writing - to be able to provide the reader with such captivating material is, for me, something to aspire to.

Both my wife and I have read your book and we were both strongly affected by it. We would like the opportunity to read it all - please let us know when it is published.

Richard and Yvette Jones

When the editors read PST, they will not be able to resist it. So, here's my vote to get it back on the table.

John

This is a beautiful beginning. I've only read the first chapter but will keep reading. It triggered all kinds of feelings in me and thank you for sharing it. Really beautiful writing.

This is a masterpiece, Violet. I have read three chapters and will read more a.s.a,p. It is so descriptive! I can see the sculptour forming in my mind; I can hear the drone of the aircraft; I can smell the intimancy between the two of them as he forms her in clay. I just wish my own book could leap to life like yours. Truly a great book. Backed with stars and on w/l.

I was intrigued by other comments so I have now read the first two chapters. Excellent fast-paced dialogue indeed. Paints the intimacy of the scenes. All the best - Kate Buchanan

Hi Violet, sounds like a fabulous story, Just read your pitch for now, but definitely one I would read if there were more weeks in the month and months in a year! Backed. - Kate Buchanan (Jenny's Rain)

Crafted by a true artist. Excellent.

Dee Farrell
Warrior Heart

PONTE SANTA TRINITA

I don't prefer telling lies. Beautiful Book, indeed. Backed.

TMN
"NEVER LOSE..."

Several people here have recommended your book to me and now I know why, such finely tuned writing, honed to a high standard but never getting in the way of the plot or characterisation. It’s ambitious straddling two generations, each with its own story to tell, but you switch neatly from one to the other often leaving us with a tempting final sentence so that now, at the end of chapter eight, we are poised to delve deeper into what promises to be a fascinating book.

Extracts I particularly noticed/enjoyed:

Ch1

“We still have our memories of him.”
“Memories don’t go forwards though,” he says with a frown.

She is curled up inside his smell.

Zinnia sorts through the contents of the old box. She is looking for something that will make her cry. ……… Mrs St Aubyn takes the notebook without any of the reverence Zinnia feels for it. Brusquely she opens it and flicks through its brittle pages. Zinnia winces at her mother’s absence of awe, her lack of tenderness. A lonely once-upon-a-time smell is reawakened from its pages.

Her mother has always had a kind of genius for offloading feeling.

What she has never told anyone took place in Florence. When she returns home she will begin translating the journal; she will return to Florence.

Ch2

Transferring the knowledge on my hands immediately onto the clay while it still had a ghostly presence on the tips of my fingers. Making a physical map of this benighted intimacy I shared with her naked body. A tactile memory I sought to emulate in the rhythms and textures of the clay. I still have this knowledge on my hands, still have this map in my memory.

What we remember we shall know again.

I always then wish that you could see me just for a moment; just long enough for me to give you back the smile you so often inspired.

Ch3
He stands by the tub in his shorts. They look at each other through the condensation. He is refusing to participate in the rite today. There is a skip of new knowledge in Zinnia. He has begun to understand that nakedness is something private and that she is telling him a lie by treating it as something ordinary, as something not worthy of attention. She places the banana shampoo on the edge of the tub and leaves the room.

“When we are older we usually cry when we’re alone. That’s just the way it is.”

Ch 4 (2)
The aspect of myself that I least liked in those days was my distance from things, an unwilled diffidence in my nature that exiled me from the thrust and interaction of life. Inwardly I edged away from contact.

One thing the war taught me is that it’s probably our flaws rather than our qualities that create our destiny.

“Because I prefer telling lies. It’s only the lies we tell that make us interesting, don’t you think?” He spoke unnaturally loudly, as though intent on claiming the attention of every single person in the bar. His Italian was excellent but his accent, unlike mine from which I’d succeeded in erasing most traces of my English origins, was strikingly foreign. “Lies force us to keep secrets. And secrets generate power and energy.”

This was not the idealistic self-regarding virtuosity of classical ballet conducted on tip-toes in rarefied air; this was a naked grounded celebration of the human form battling with its own pivotal elements, a transfiguration of the human spirit’s susceptibility to fall and recovery.

and was suddenly shaken by the realisation of how much happiness there is in habit. And the realisation that this was a habit I was on the verge of losing forever.

Ch 5
She sees the way he stands always in clothes he seems to be saving for a better occasion and admires the job he has done on parking his car. It’s an achievement, like closing a business deal, for which he expects recognition. He invariably finds fault in the way she aligns her car to the kerb. He delivers up a critical running commentary while she reverses into the space that puts her on edge. Once upon a time he measured her progress in a similar way when they made love.

She looks down at the twenty-two-year-old Zinnia sitting on the steps of the church of Santo Spirito and feels intimidated by her younger self. They are strangers to each other. There is a tug of mutual antagonism, of fearful resistance as they try to connect. The younger Zinnia has no knowledge of the older Zinnia but the older Zinnia has chosen to forget the younger Zinnia.

“I don’t know. Sometimes we stop doing things without really realising we’ve stopped.”

Ch 6 (4)
There was a punctilious watchful atmosphere inside the mean building. One was allowed so little of one’s identity, pared down to a poverty of circumstantial details – that was the feeling.

The authorities now though had my address. This would eventually bring them to my door.

She had, I remember, a lingering secretive way of pronouncing it that made it seem a part of my nakedness.

When my image began to look like her it was exciting to press my hands into the yielding clay effigy of her head, find the arabesques and highlights in her thick black hair, shape the quizzical arch of her eyebrows, alter the line of her mouth with the tips of my fingers with her sitting no less than a foot away, her scent a teasing phantom of the affirmation she still denied me.

I think she had been keen on dying for quite a while.

….whereas I consign things to the past so as to become more intimate with them.”

I caught a glimpse of her bedroom as I was leaving. I hoped to spy something intimate and revealing – perhaps an item of clothing abandoned on the floor or a smudge of powder on her pillow, some folds on the undersheet that mapped out where her body had slept. It occurred to me that she would enter this
room when I left. Take off her clothes there while perhaps thinking of me and the evening we had spent together. But the room I saw had been tidied of all its secrets, cleansed of all its fingerprints and scents. It gave me no new knowledge of her body. It offered up a blank face to the interrogation of my eye. It was stark, arctic, especially the bed. The cold white snow of the sheet on her bed shone in the darkness. It was like a bed no one had ever slept in.

We worked eight hours a day. We were paid about one lira an hour – eight five lire coins a week. A book at that time cost about 500 lire.
(Interesting that he equates the value of money not to bread, but books)

It was in the winter of 1941 that Nello Nocentini appeared one day at the studio. I didn’t know that was his real name at the time. He told me his name was Aldo and that he was interested in buying some sculptures. He wanted to see Fausto, who was in Rome at the time. Something about him troubled me, even back then.

Ooooh, ominous, what's going to happen?

Ch 7

Great description of Zinnia’s panic attack and subsequent remorse – we feel it.

As she looks for a taxi she sees a familiar face. For an instant she can’t place the woman. She is like a five second sample of a song she recognises but cannot for the life of her name. There are too many doors in her memory that won’t open. The woman though recognises her.

Chapter 8 (6)

There was always some shame now whenever one caught oneself enjoying life.

“If he would kill me otherwise I suppose I could,”

Fausto’s sculpture of the three fates was finished and had been mounted on the bridge outside Mugnola. There was a small ceremony to celebrate its unveiling. At a time when the destruction of bridges was a strategically planned imperative all over Europe it seemed a gesture of almost foolhardly optimism to celebrate the ornamentation of one.

Then I realised the huge smoking crater surrounded by heaps of debris was where the bakers had been. I thought of the little boy and the contact the baker’s hand had made with my own. It was as if I had some memory of him on my skin.

I spent one last anxious night in my flat in via Maggio. Once or twice a car drove past outside and made the glass rattle in my bedroom window and each time my whole body stiffened with foreboding.

Again, as readers we are anxious to know more.

Good luck with this, Violet, I have my fingers crossed for you. So very near.

Regards
Ellie

Ponte Santa Trinita:

Violet, I remember this great story from last year, and I'm delighted to put it on my shelf again, and I've sprinkled lots of stardust over it. :)

I love your writing, how you make me feel as though I'm right in the scenes with Zinnia, and I hate to be picky but a couple of little things jumped out at me. I'm no editor so I won't mind if you totally disagree with my notes. For what they're worth, here they are.

“Memories don’t go forwards (needs comma, I think...) though,” he says with a frown.
How about: “Memories don’t go forwards, though.” As he looks up at her, he frowns? Or, - he says, and frowns?
~
- She wonders if it is natural for a child to be so excited by the presence of death. - What would you think of putting this in italics, for her thoughts? - I wonder if it’s natural for a child to be so excited by the presence of death?
~
- looking from her father’s dead face to the watch on her wrist that bewilderingly, cruelly, reassuringly is still counting off seconds, minutes, hours.- Hmm… 'bewilderingly, cruelly, reassuringly'. Three ‘ly’ words in a row. From what I’ve read, we should avoid as much as possible.

Just experimenting here, :o]…looking from her father’s dead face to the watch on her wrist that bewilders and cruelly reassures her as it counts off the seconds, minutes, hours?
~
“Aren’t you going to kiss him goodbye, mum?” capital M for Mum, here.

“I’ve said goodbye in my own way, Felix,” she says. - No need to say, she says, as we know it’s her speaking?

I have a few more if you'd like them so let me know.

This is a book I'd definitely like to have right in my hands to read.

Cáit :o)

One thing I noticed as a possible type and forgot to point out. Second chapter, “I dare you to sculpt me blindfold.” Do you mean blindfolded?

Violet,
(It said) Why I had to kill Mario Carita---I was swept away readily in chapter one. Your book came highly recommended, and then I saw some lovely threads about it. I completely enjoyed the early chapters that I've read so far. Very artful writing. I'm happy to rate this highly for you.
Best wishes,
Bea

After reading two chapters I had to stop, at least long enough to exhale and inhale. I believe I'd been forgetting to. Beautifully written: I see why this is on the Editor's Desk, and that's where it needs to stay. Six stars, and I'll MAKE a spot on my bookshelf.

Ponte Santa Trinita is beautifully written Violet, your writing is melodic and sensual. I’ve been learning a lot about 'show don't tell' and I think your writing is the perfect example. I will continue to read and back with pleasure. Best of luck – it looks like this is your month.

Violet,
I read through chapter four and am quite impressed. So many fine turns of phrase in this richly told story. I especially liked: My instinct was to hit him back . . . The hatred with which we regarded each other was an electric and powerful force. It felt more immediately consequential than love in its throbbing clamour for expression.
This work well deserves six stars, which I happily offer.
I'll come back to read the rest.
Cheers!
John B Campbell

Chapter 2

You know, I'd almost think you were there when all this was happening, but that would make you at least eighty. Your descriptions, even down to the smallest detail, are brilliant - the bombers overhead, the intensity of the scene, his tactile explorations of her skin - all of them. With a minimum of set-up the reader knows where, when and with whom they are dealing. Narration: the past and present coexist nicely as a passion held in check mingled with a sense of loss and melancholy.

Details are what place the reader where you want them, and you have a great talent for it. If I were to pick out lines that stood out to me I'd be quoting the whole damn chapter back to you.

In the sentence: (There was a bakery next door to her building.../...when we're talking in bed together.) there is a 'were' where 'we're' should be.

Check the word 'more'. It doesn't do anything to help the excellent prose around it. There are two of them near each other toward the front of the chapter.

I read some of the comments below mine and totally agree with Rebecca Jameson (and she said it better than I could by a long shot): it's a beautiful blend.

I don't think I have anything here that will help very much but it was truly a pleasure to read. Best of luck, Vi
Gerry

Mad Orlando the 39,000 line poem incarnate loves your Italiante story. That is good enough for me!

My only regret is that I haven't caught up with your book until now. Ah, what a fine beginning. I love the tone. We're leaving for the weekend, so as not to seem cavalier with six stars (which this immediately has the feel of), I will make this a priority-read and rate upon our return. I'll see what I can do to support, as well. Until then, have a great weekend.
Cheers!
John B Campbell

Clever putting the modern parts of the novel in the present tense and using a lively minimalist prose style which arrestingly counterpoints the more dense and descriptive past tense war sections. Early on there’s a sense of Zinnia being resistant to memory, deftly evoked by the focus on surface detail which her father’s death and then the journal will begin to break down. Architecturally it’s brilliantly constructed. The writing itself is gorgeously romantic. Zinnia and Felix’s relationship drawn with engaging tenderness. This for me is a six star book.

HI
I can hear your voice in your writing. Very much intruding and interesting. Love to read it completly.

All the best.

S.Vinay kumar,
10 roses for love

I was truly smitten with the mysterious tone in your story which begins when Zinnia uncovers the diary. There is so much sensitivity you render to finding the right words to describe an object, action and the means in which these blend with the total scenery and setting you choose. This is praiseworthy as it highlights the manner in which you mold your characters against the larger picture of your story, very much like an artist who plans the colors and shadows that would emerge on an empty canvas. Another thing I noticed is you create your stories with a lilt charged by a subtle emotion that speaks through the words you choose. Yes indeed, the story that emanates from the diary is intriguing as is the situation that confronts Zinnia when reality hits back in Chapter 3 with her son returning home in the most terrifying form that any mother would fear…I applaud your manuscript for the sensitivity it harnesses and the mysterious treat it promises; it will be the kind of writing that involves some quiet time on my part but it will be a beautiful read to enjoy, I’m sure. Your book afforded me the pleasure of taking off a ball gown and standing naked in the moonlight by the window. Thank you.

Great book. I backed it an age ago under the old "you tickle mine and I'll tickle yours" regime. I've been away from Authonomy for ages (it took up too much time for too little of any value - I thought) but Elin O'Neil got in touch to tell me you needed some help to get to your rightful position. So I just stepped back on site today to re-back you and leave it there. Don't bother replying because I probably won't be here. Good luck. Gabe

Chapter 3.

I can tell this book will continue to be a page turner. Weaving back and forth through time, you create a kind of duality that allows for both the tension of intellectual intrigue as well as the relief of contemporary familiarity. One minute we are in Florence , next we are sending text messages and googling "Genes."

Violet. I will continue reading. This book is a pleasure and one of the best I have come across on this site

chapter 2

Stunningly sensual. A sculptor working blindfolded, gun on the table, the faint odor of garlic and basil, pecorino , a map of Tuscany with markings of hidden artworks. The sculptor maps her muse….

Violet, I feel as though I’m tipsy on the most delicious wine in the most enchanted corner of the globe as I am reading your work…Its like peering through a kaleidoscope of all the world’s most beautiful images, sights , tastes and sounds.

Clever dialogue, evocative images,

“Whenever the beauty of life takes me by surprise, you become part of that moment.” ---I stopped for a few moments and thought about this. It moved me so…

“I always then wish that you could see me just for a moment; just long enough for me to give you back the smile you so often inspired.”— Simply haunting. Elegantly woven. I have no constructive criticism to offer.

Dear Violet,

I usually offer constructive criticism but when there's no need, well all that's left is praise. Intriguing and beautifully told, I loved reading this first chapter from start to finish.

here are a bunch of my favorites:

“chill of heresy followed by the sludge of guilt.” ---I’ve never heard it quite that way before, and now that you’ve written it, yes, that’s EXACTLYL how it feels. Heresy with a chill, guilt with a sludge. No idea how you came up with that but its brilliant.

“in that act of giving she she experienced herself as that flower…she needed him to understand her no less than she needed to remain a mystery.”

“She is looking for something that will make her cry.”

“A lonely, once upon a time smell is reawakened from its pages.” (enchanting)

“Why I had to kill Mario Carita.” HERE WE GO…

“The temptation to betray a secret is always there, always exhaling its hot intimate breath in your ear.” You seem so fully aware of the human condition…I just want to shout back and say, “Yes! Yes, that’s exactly how it feels, that secret of mine.”

Great Cliffhanger at the end of chapter! I just have to move onto chapter 2.

This book was recommended to me by a friend and oh, my, does that person know me well....I loved this.
The first chapter spoke to my heart, unfolded and explained memories that I had long held inside myself. Thank you for putting into words the feelings I could not, would not.
Chapter two was, is, mesmerising...your talent screams from the page. I love the way you write.
I will be back for more. Have sprinkled the maximum amount of stardust possible and will shelve as immediately as possible.
You have talent, you have a voice and a feeling that jumps from the page. Thank you for sharing your innermost thoughts and your fantasies. I would definitely buy this book. In fact, can I have an autographed copy??

Millie C xx (In awe.)

Well Violet, I don't remember reading Chapter 2 when I last read your book. You have my friend Ron(aka Orlando) in raptures. I bet he'd like to sculpt Ivy.
I must go and lie down.

Haha ... I can't beat Orlando but I must say C2 - WOW - sensual isn't the word. I love this book, Violet. I love ... no I adore ... your writing, tis what I could only wish to aspire to. And like Orlando I fell, once again, under your spell and read the whole thing! Can't really get enough of it ... couldn't we have just a little weeny, tiny bit more?

Beautiful writing.

Lynn

Ch 2.
Maybe he comes to know her in a way that she, who was trapped in the mirror, cannot. He is learning her in such a way that he will never forget. She has tied the knot inside him which has realeased him from his Englishness to be tactile, to win his tactile memory of her.And the final graph from 12 years on shows how the memory in him resurfaces whenever he encounters beauty. But we are left wondering, ominously, if these memories are all he has of her, what becomes of her?
It has been a pleasure to read this new version with new eyes. I am left thinking how beautiful life can be and how horrible and brutal men can be and how insensitive to said fragile beauty. A part of me is envious of the tender intimacies in the name of art and love which you evoke so beautifully. But what will happen to G? We fear for their love.

Ch 2.
The small talk of model and artist is charming, though the word 'ghost' is ominous, esp if light of the earlier 'executed.' The outside world and the war is as deep a reality for them as what they are engaged in. The art making has excluded it. But perhaps it will prove the stronger force and the art making is merely a feeble escapt from it. Talk of the bakery seems to shift the focus from the immediate. And 'At times she laughed...' has a retrospective feel to it. There is a sense that this moment has not long to go. Ach, I'm wrong...the focus far from shifting away from G is shifting from her external form to her inner being and her metaphorical being as sea-woman. And then she is the one pulling away from him, thinking of a cigarette and reflectingd on previous times!

Ch 2.
Ach, the lying lover! sneaking a glimpse of those toes! That glimpse is also absolutely erotic in the sweetest of ways. '...bewitchingly vivid as if carved of light...' This also echoes (!) the light reference in the lead graph. Ach, and I note the word choreography there fits with her being a dancer. All this seems to make her light. War is heavy and rattles windows. Love is light and dances. War steals art and hides it away love makes art.
And now even Mr.Armature-Zygomatic is surrendering to the moment shifting from planes/gesture/texture to hollows/dips/mounds. The heat of G's skin and the chill of the clay is delightful.

Ch 2.
The language fascinates with its contrasts also. The artist becomes all technical with armature/zygomatic/sternomasoid/trochanter/vertebrae while G is ticklish/wriggling/laughing. Yet the man is '...sensitised by blindness' ... and she uses the harshest word of all '...executed...' The most moving sensitive thought is then his, '...she became a kind of mirage of mad longing and isolation...'
'Talk to me' reasserts the urgency of the moment. It is as if the immediacy of the moment is all, more important than abstract, esp ours. The moment is more real that the reader at that precise point.

Ch 2.
'Five hours.' My god! This man is demanding! But at least he has got the cheerse. And yes, what value does jewelry have compared with a love dish anyway? But G is a stickler also with her insistance on keeping him blindfold while he eats. The pears, cheese, and breadcrumbs over the map with its war facts signify that the food of live, the love dish are above the base facts of war. Yet the underlying truth is that war has art ringed, literally. The stocking is absolutely erotic. The knot is tied inside him also. No man so tied could ever untie such a knot inside his soul, nor would he ever want to. The reading of her three dimensional body map with touch puts the war map even more in its place as love triumphs.

Ch 2
'She took out the pins...the gentle splash of rain on her face.' is achingly beautiful and perfectly captures an intimate moment of loving commitment. The unpinning and shaking says 'Here I am. I am yours and I am ready to love you and be loved by you.' The shift from danger to domesticity is total and intense. The one seems to underscore the other being so opposite and exclusive of it. Yet the gun in on the table and the air raid siren and the armoured vehicle intrude physically. Yet the herbs and the clay are there, too. And it may be that there is danger in the dare also, should things go wrong in some way. I confess I read the line about being too English and too rational in a personal way.