What a fierce, tender, obsessive book. Merriweather chisels at language until it rings, and the restored marginalia feels like finding the artisan's fingerprints in the clay—intimate, unguarded, necessary.
This novel made me listen differently. The rooms over Via Garibaldi hum with a quiet that isn't absence but pressure, the kind of silence art requires before it risks speaking. I could hear Luca's mallet pauses, the soft exhale before the next strike, and the pianist's rests as hard-won choices rather than gaps.
Luca and Elodie ache without melodrama. Their devotion is a workshop discipline, fierce and unsentimental, and when Florence leans in—salons along the Arno, that city of stone and rumor—the book catches a current that felt fated. I underlined until my pencil went blunt.
The apparatus is a gift. Marta Renzulli's compositor's note tilts the light just so; Clare Merriweather's remembrance grounds the myth in family air; Imani DeVere's preface frames the whole enterprise as a wager on attention. It all belongs here.
La Nazione's line—"bronze eclipsed bread and rumor outpaced prayer"—arrives like a bell, and the novel keeps answering it with poise. Sculptor of Sonnets listens for the dangerous hush in which art decides who we might become, and I was enthralled.
