Girl In A Turban

by Marta Morazzoni

In five baroque tales, actual historical characters, places, and times are transformed into new life--Mozart, Corenzo da Ponte and Salieri, a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant, a sixteenth-century Spanish courtier, and a paralyzed man in Vienna

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Short Stories

157 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Born in 1950, she is an high school teacher

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

The literary world’s fascination with this Vermeer painting continues. The cover of these five short stories by Italian author Marta Morazzoni has the same cover painting as Girl with the Pearl Earring, a novel by Tracy Chevalier.



These are five stories of the process of dying, some built around the deaths of famous people. In the story The White Door the author imagines Mozart’s death at age 35. She builds a story of loneliness, hypochondria and premature aging: “How old you’ve got” his wife says after not seeing him for just a short time.

The Last Assignment is focused on Charles V, King of Spain and of all of the Holy Roman Empire. Overwhelmed and bored by his duties he decides to retire to a monastery in Spain to live in relative seclusion – but he still lives and eats like royalty. The story is told from the perspective on a young man who had been his servant until the young man married, but Charles now orders that he leave his family and return to serve him. The servant, much older now, has a mysterious connection to a gypsy woman he meets daily when he travels to the market to buy the king’s food. The servant realizes he is trapped into servitude for the rest of the king’s life – but it won’t be long now after the king becomes seriously ill.



In the title story, Girl in a Turban, the author imagines a Dutch merchant who deals in all kinds of goods but makes a special profit from paintings. Despite the impending birth of his first child, the merchant takes a long trip by sea to visit a wealthy widower in Denmark who will consider buying the painting. The theme here is that the two men seems more enamored by the girl in the painting than by flesh-and-blood women.

One other story is of an older Austrian man who becomes completely paralyzed and even unable to speak. The reactions of his wife and children are described in words such as horror, embarrassment, vulgar and grotesque.

Great stories on an important period that everyone will face in their life.



The author (b. 1950) has written a dozen or so novels but only a few have been translated into English. Of those, The Alphonse Courrier Affair seems to be her best-know work in English. However, even that novel has only 55 ratings on GR, so she remains relatively unknown in English.

Painting, The Girl With a Pearl Earring by Vermeer, c. 1665, from amazon.com
Mozart from mentalfloss.com
The author from modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morazzoni, an amazing Italian novelist, was one of the first to take a Vermeer painting and write the backstory to it---in this case a picture dealer in the Netherlands taking the painting from Scheveningen to a buyer in Denmark by ship. The subtlety of Morazzoni's writing, her delicate understanding of Dutch life and the way she is able to imagine the queit moments in which meaning is constructed resembles the technique of Vermeer himself. It makes all the recent Vermeer-based literary efforts seem amateur and broad in stroke.

[Richard Seltzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Girl in a Turban is a collection of stories, delicate stylistic pieces that catch you up with their style, that you read with pleasure, and then soon forget both the plots and the characters. The title piece tells of a family of art dealers. The father, Bernhard, delivers a very precious cargo -- the Vermeer painting -- by ship to a friend and customer, a Danish nobleman. There he meets and is intrigued by, but does not pursue the friend's attractive daughter, Ariadne. He is married. His wife is pregnant with their first child. He needs to hurry home. The son, Jan, grows up, the image of his father, carrying on his business with the same exactitude and devotion. After the death of Bernhard, when Jan is 40 and still unmarried, he receives a letter from Ariadne. Her father too is dead, and she has fallen on hard times and will have to liquidate her property. Before doing so, she wants to give back to Jan the painting that her father and his father had so treasured. As the story ends, he rushes, "promptly," to retrieve it. In this low-key story, the reader keeps expecting romance, but the central characters are singularity self-possessed, involved in and pleased with their quiet, comfortable lives. Bernhard leaves his pregnant wife behind, with few qualms, when he sets out on the long and perhaps perilous voyage to Denmark. Business -- or rather the fate of the painting -- comes first. The Danish nobleman is so content with his life that he boasts he has "never slept a single night under another roof," having spent his entire life on his ancestral property. Jan at 40 is devoted to the family business, and while he promised his father on his deathbed that he would marry, to have an heir, he hasn't gotten around to it yet. All three cherish the painting.

There was a brief moment in Denmark, when, while talking to Ariadne, Bernhard had fleeting thoughts of how comfortable it would be to stay in Denmark. But he brushes those aside -- duty calls.

The expression of the girl in the painting is one of a reluctant good-bye. She is leaving, but looks back, as if wishing to stay, as if wishing that things could be other than what they are. Her mouth is partly open, as if there were something that she wanted to say, and she just needs the slightest prompt to come out with it.

In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos. She gave Theseus the clues he needed to find his way through the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur. Theseus took her with him, but then, for no particular reason, simply abandoned her on a island on the way home to Athens. She is a woman abandoned, a woman whose love is not reciprocated.

[Gaia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I racconti sono in linea di massima tutti interessanti e ben scritti... il problema è che non arrivano mai da nessuna parte. Ogni singola storia si conclude lasciandoti con la domanda "ah, e quindi?", senza un fine, una morale, un obiettivo. Solo una serie di eventi di cui non esiste alcuna conclusione – fatta eccezione magari per il quarto racconto, che una sorta di finale ce l'ha, infatti è stato quello che mi è piaciuto di più. Gli altri, tutti piuttosto deboli.

[Paul Manytravels · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written stories, most set in the 15th-17th centuries. The attention to details and developing the setting and atmosphere is quite good, but the stories have little action or real point to them. I finished the book because the writing was good, but I wish there had been something actually happening in the stories.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marta Morazzoni is a writer of exceptional talent and these 5 short stories are so beautifully told in periods of history between the 15th and 17th centuries. The title of the book refers to Vermeer’s painting of The Girl in the Pearl Earring and is captivating in its detail.

[Philip Coulter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories around Charles V and Lorenzo Da Ponte were my favourites. The others might benefit from a re-read at some point, but they seemed a little bland to me.

[Ecidici · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, molto bella l'ultima novella

[JodiP · Rating 1 out of 5]

This collection of short stories all share the theme of picking a real time, place or historical character and telling a story. I thought it would be so itneresting! I did finish the first, about Mozart (which I wouldn't have known but for the jacket description) I didn't finish the second story about an Italian at the Hapsburg Court writing a libretto. BORING. You could tell that he and the other character were just going to ge into some spat. The writing is quiet but not the dynamism that needs ot be there with this type of writing.

[Pepe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spesso accade che un libro rimanga per anni davanti ai nostri occhi e lo snobiamo, poi quando lo prendiamo in mano - perché a un certo punto dobbiamo leggerlo - ci sorprende. Così mi è capitato con il libro della Marazzoni, con cinque racconti assolutamente pregevoli, dalla prosa raffinata e accurata, un po' "retrò" ma perfettamente aderente alle ambientazioni e alla costruzione dei racconti.