From the November 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
You cannot fault the pedigree of Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Bomarzo. On its original publication in Argentina in 1962 it was praised by Borges for bringing back the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson and Victor Hugo to the modern novel, and promptly went on to win the Gran Premio Nacional de Literatura. Never out of print in Spanish, this new edition of Gregory Rabassa’s 1969 translation comes as a welcome chance to read a book that, in prospect at least, is mouthwatering – above all for devotees of early modern Italy.
Framed as the memoirs of the real-life 16th-century nobleman Pier Francesco Orsini, Bomarzo is a paean to the era, and to one of its strangest creations: the so-called Sacro Bosco sculpture garden at the eponymous estate near Viterbo. Its pages plunge the reader deep into a glittering and sanguinary world decorated by Cellini, Michelangelo and Vasari, populated by Medicis, Farneses and Borgias, and ravaged by familial, political and religious conflict. Few backdrops have either better brand recognition or more to conjure with, and Mujica Lainez’s Italy is sumptuous: at once minutely and grandly imagined through its own art as a kind of ekphrastic hallucination of pomp and perfidy. Among the wars and intrigues, Vicino – as Orsini was known – passes as a simultaneously powerful and marginal figure: the hunchbacked second son of a powerful condottiero, who rises by luck and murder to the status of family head, before retreating to his estate and creating his ‘Sacred Wood of Monsters’.
A series of sculptural follies created after the death of Vicino’s wife, the Sacro Bosco is an enigma not unlike a three-dimensional Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. An inspiration to Salvador Dalí, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Michelangelo Antonioni as well as Mujica Lainez, it is one of those grand historical oddities that craves an explanation. And that is exactly what Mujica Lainez’s Vicino sets out to provide. While the historical Vicino – sans hunchback, sans homicides – is something of a cipher in the archives, Mujica Lainez’s narrator is a wounded monster desperate to tell the story of his life as culminating in his garden. In doing so, Vicino is equipped with the insights provided by a strand of fantasy that renders him immortal and allows him to speak across the centuries from an Olympian perspective, adding references to Toulouse-Lautrec, Nabokov and Nerval to the already overstuffed prose.
For all the glittering backdrop and the intrinsic interest of the Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo’s allure relies on Vicino’s voice. With much of Shakespeare’s Richard III, and a good deal of Humbert Humbert, he is that classic figure: the baddie who tells all, and aims to seduce in the telling. Only, I was not seduced. Rarely has a book so tempting in prospect proven so frustrating in the reading.
The prose, as Álvaro Enrigue notes in his introduction, is redolent of 19th-century French decadence, but the methodology is firmly of the Freudian 20th century. The result is a suffocating combination of aesthetic overload with the solipsism and repetition of the talking cure. Here, for instance, is an early sentence:
My horror of ugliness and my passion for beauty in human beings, in objects, in poetical games, had produced disappointment and bitterness in me, but it had given my life an exalted tone and a certain tormented grandeur: it came from a horror of myself and the resulting disgust caused in me by any teratological aberration.
If this were not explanation enough, the next paragraph enters into the topic of Vicino’s future interest in antiquities – which naturally he holds for ‘more complex reasons’ than any of his contemporaries.
Perhaps I had hoped that the nearness of those harmonious survivors would be some kind of magical therapy for me; perhaps I had calculated that if I sank into a sea of beauty, surrounding myself with rhythmic marbles until I disappeared behind their intertwined appearances […] where every item, the smoothness of a brow, the arc of an arm, the proportions of a chest, would arouse the emotions that joined poetry to mathematics, it would succeed in making me forget about myself.
These are both virtuosic sentences, yet at the same time subject to an insistent psychological determinism that, continued as it is over 600 pages, becomes positively bludgeoning. While the dictum of ‘Show don’t tell’ can be over-obeyed, it is sometimes nice to be shown, or at least to be told only once. Wedded to his self-analysis, Vicino is a pleasureless, and therefore rather charmless, narrator.
There are pleasures here, which will affect different readers to a greater or lesser extent. As in many historical novels there is both the delight of celebrity spotting and the danger of name-dropping. Vicino is kissed by Cellini, painted by Lotto, accompanied by Vasari at the court of the Medicis, treated for syphilis by Paracelsus and loaned a book by Cervantes. The prose, too, comes to life when Mujica Lainez plugs it into sources such as Benozzo Gozzoli’s Magi Chapel in Florence (c. 1459) to evoke the pomp and glory of the era.
But celebrity and ekphrasis are not always enough. With the spirit of Hugo invoked, I found myself longing to re-read Notre Dame de Paris – which is, for all its flaws, simultaneously exciting and jaw-droppingly rich in its prose. There are novels both longer and shorter that do the job so much better. Hugo lives on far more clearly in the baggy yarn of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (deceptively readable at just under 3,000 pages long) while Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Abyss (just over 300) remains unbeatable as a foray into the psychology of a so-called Renaissance Man. As for the mystery of the Sacro Bosco itself, perhaps the best thing is simply to cut out the middleman and go to Bomarzo for oneself.
Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez is published by NYRB Classics.
From the November 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
