A Baker, a Mad Inventor, a Blasphemous ‘Priest’ and More

Writers and musicians from dour northern countries have long been inspired by a sunny, sensual Italy that existed as much in their imaginations as in reality. In the cases of Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Thomas Mann and E.M. Forster, this infatuation gave rise to notable art. In lesser hands, it only reinforced a stereotype of Italians as wonderful but not quite rational people, slaves to their appetites, vendettas and superstitions.

In “The Breadmaker’s Carnival,” Andrew Lindsay, who hails from a laid-back southern country, Australia, strikes a middle course. This novel is full of food, wine, sexual excess, religious fanaticism and quasi-supernatural events. But it also contains acute psychological analysis and more than a little of the tragic sense that permeates Italy’s own literature, so that we don’t feel Lindsay is exploiting the place, once again, just for laughs.

The story is told by a dying man, the narrator’s grandfather, who says, “I don’t expect you to believe a word of this.” It’s the story of how the town of Bacheretto had its first Breadmaker’s Carnival, and if it seems more of a legend than a history, Lindsay has disarmed our skepticism. The old man’s memory is unreliable, of course. He’s bound to embellish the details. And it all takes place in rural isolation, in a past distant enough--there are trucks but no computers--to bathe it in a soft, sepia light.

The breadmaker of the title is fat Gianni Terremoto, who is distraught because his 13-year-old daughter, Francesca, is growing up too fast, and his lover, Sylvana, has left him. Sylvana, a history teacher reduced to mending china plates, turns to Stefano Costa, who lost a hand in a construction accident. Stefano has an artificial hand made by Luigi Bacheretti, a mad inventor who tries to take photographs of God. Stefano also has a fling with dancer Pia Zanetti, an amputee who has learned to perform on one leg. Pia in turn is pursued obsessively by a bartender, Amaretto, nicknamed for the almond liqueur he brews.

Before Francesca has her first period, Gianni sends her to be a maid in the house of the local priest, Emile Pestoso--a mistake, because Emile is neither an ordained clergyman nor entirely in his right mind. He sexually mutilates Francesca, who tells nobody but starts scrawling vaginal symbols on every vacant wall. Gianni, guilty over neglecting his daughter, hatches a crazy plan: The traditional buns he bakes for Good Friday--which coincides, for the first time in 213 years, with April Fool’s Day--are laced with powerful aphrodisiacs. Waves of irrationality sweep over the town: First, an orgy; then, after Francesca stands up in church and accuses Emile, vigilante violence; then wall-toppling and pyromania and the creation of a martyr-saint; and finally, a tremendous hangover, physical and moral.

It’s a lot to cram into one novel. Lindsay strives to press meaning out of it, like oil from a bumper crop of olives. He succeeds in most of his short chapters, but the story as a whole resists him. The subplots are only loosely connected to the central tale of Gianni, Francesca and Emile. And the grandfather-narrator strategy that helps Lindsay in some ways works against him in others.

The grandfather, born after the first Breadmaker’s Carnival, enters every character’s mind and describes things he not only never saw but couldn’t have learned by hearsay. He utters psychological and philosophical profundities beyond the ken of even the canniest villager. To make Emile real to the reader, he probes the priest’s past as an abused child and a religious doubter so sympathetically that we are jarred when, in the end, he expresses contempt for Emile and upholds the village’s verdict that this man of God was, in fact, a devil.