Con Brio
By (Author) Brina Svit
Vintage Publishing
Vintage
1st September 2003
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
891.8436
Paperback
176
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 11mm
125g
'Con Brio consumes us like a bout of fever... Disconcerting and brilliant. Give it to your best friend' - Elle In a brasserie off the Boulevard St-Germain, a renowned novelist watches, entranced, the motions of a young woman's hands folding a restaurant bill into a paper boat. This passing observation - slim fingers against a white linen tablecloth - provides the springboard for this story of love and jealousy. The novelist's orderly life vanishes the instant he admires this strange woman's hands; the discipline of forty fruitful years dissolves. On an impulse, he proposes. She answers without hesitation - yes, she will marry him, but only on her terms. She will occupy his house, but not his bed. When she moves in, Kati upends her new husband's meticulous domestic arrangements, then his sanity. Her stubborn detachment transforms the writer from a cool, amused observer of life into a creature ravaged by doubt, passion and jealousy. With a brutality counterpointed by the elegance and subtlety of Savit's prose, this story dramatises the ruinous consequences of sexual obsession.
Con Brio explores the different ways men and women experience love, desire, absolute devotion, and the mystery each has for the other * Le Monde *
Brina Svit was born in Slovenia in 1959, and divides her time between Paris and Slovenia. She works as a journalist, screenwriter and director, and has also written novels, among them Con Brio and Death of a Prima Donna have been translated into Engish.