The Blind Contessa’s New Machine is the debut novel by the young Midwestern writer, Carey Wallace. It is a fictionalized account of the true story of Pellegrino Turri, a 19th century Italian inventor who developed the first typewriter for his blind friend, Carolina Fantoni. From the actual surviving letters that Fantoni wrote to Turri, Wallace’s novel imagines a love affair that inspired that important invention. The Blind Contessa’s New Machine is set in Italy in the 1800’s. The theme and structure of the book have elements of both the Gothic romance and the Victorian novels of that time. The central plot of the novel is a tangled love story. The author relies heavily on the relationships and struggles of a few people in a single community. Similar to the Victorian novel, there is a strong moral overlay in which virtue is applauded and wrongdoers eventually pay for their sins.
A recent Wall Street Journal piece coined the phrase “bore-geous” to describe a novel full of lovely descriptions of places and people which is so lacking in plot that it “bores even its author.” The premise of the editorial was that good narrative writing must defend itself: that every sentence should have a purpose beyond its beauty. While I might argue with the need to justify the use of each word, I agree that a good novel should have a compelling narrative progression. Although I had not read the Journal piece before I started The Blind Contessa’s New Machine, I initially found myself raising the same question and wondering if there was much to the novel beyond wonderfully evocative prose. Happily, my fears were unfounded.
The story is told from the perspective of Carolina Fantoni, who describes her childhood, the surrounding lake and countryside and her relationships in ethereal, atmospheric detail. Carolina’s father is a traditional Italian patriarch who loves his daughter but is caught up in his own world view. Carolina’s mother is reclusive, spending most of her time in her rooms, where she frequently goes for days without speaking with her daughter. As a result, Carolina spends much of her childhood in a dreamy solitude in a one-room lake house at the edge of their property, “where she spent more nights on the couch in the cottage than in her own bed, buried like a black-eyed field mouse in piles of think velvet, or naked in the warmth of the summer sun left as a remembrance after it sets…”
It is during her visits to the lake house that Carolina comes to know Turri, a slightly older married neighbor. Turri is a “dreamer of the worst sort” who, on their first encounter, was building a machine to trap angels. As the years progress, the two share their intimate secrets and dreams. They become close friends, and eventually, after Carolina’s marriage and blindness, the two become impassioned lovers. At the age of seventeen, however, Carolina caught the eye of Pietro, the village’s most eligible bachelor. It is described that he could have any of the town’s young girls, yet he chooses Carolina, as much for her inscrutable, independent character as for her beauty. Carolina, forgetting Turri for the time, is at first overjoyed at being Pietro’s favorite, returning the “pirates and invisible ink of her youthful dreams to the prop boxes in her mind …” As the façade falls away, she becomes exhausted from serving as the only audience for a man raised by crowds of admirers. The extreme isolation of Carolina’s life is evidenced by the opening paragraph of the book which reveals that on the eve of Carolina’s marriage to Pietro, Carolina is going blind but no one other than Turri will believe her. She has told them all, but neither her busy father nor her withdrawn mother nor her carefree, fop of a husband, actually listens to what she is saying.
The author paints a painstaking picture of what it must be like to slowly lose one’s sight. The reader can almost understand the gradual narrowing of this worldview and the accompanying isolation it must have brought before the invention of modern communication devices. When complete blindness comes, it is even too much for Carolina who is used to a life of solitude. Wallace does an excellent job of describing Carolina’s struggle to exist in her sightless world and the roles that music and fantasy come to play in it. A good deal of the novel is dedicated to the love affair that develops between Turri and Carolina after she has gone blind. Whether out of concern or control, Pietro has locked Carolina in their house. Through the help of the writing machine that Turri invented for her to communicate with him, Carolina eventually breaks out and begins to spend all her nights with Turri at the lake house where she describes in vivid detail what she sees in her dreams.
On one level, the book is a love story built out of tragedy and longing. On another level, it is about blindness, not just of a visual type, but to the needs and emotions of those around you and the different coping mechanisms that result. It fulfills its promise of demonstrating that “love is the mother of invention.” This is a wonderfully lyrical novel with a poignant message. The passages are haunting and somber, but strongly evocative. I recommend this book as much for its story as for the beauty of the writing.
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