The Etruscan: a literary gothic tale set in 1922

By Linda Lappin

http://amazon.com/dp/1904893007

In this post-modern literary gothic novel, Harriet Sackett, a feminist photographer, travels to Italy to photograph Etruscan tombs for the Theosophical Society in 1922. Here she falls in love with a charismatic count, Federigo del Re, extraordinary in the tradition of the Conte de St. Germaine, who materializes and disappears into the eerie Etruscan landscape. Her well-bred cousins from Russell Square manage to save her from her fatal obsession by wiping out all evidence of his improbable existence. The story is told from the point of view of the Bloomsbury friends, whose own dark secrets are incidentally revealed as they read Harriet’s personal journal of the love affair in which Harriet stalks her phantasm-lover through a labyrinth of distorting mirrors. Is the Conte Federigo Del Re faithful; is he a real count, or even a real man; a fantasy or an Etruscan ghost? This shape-shifting Rochester will not be tracked down, unmasked or domesticated. The Etruscan has been hailed by Italian critics as a new classic in American writing about Italy.