Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome

Barkan, Leonard. "Satyr Square: A Year, A Life in Rome", Northwestern University Press, 2006. A View From the Mind Amos Lassen Leonard Barkan is a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and he spent a year in Rome researching how during the Roman Renaissance there was a practice of exhuming scripture and he relays to us what went on culturally and personally during that year in "Satyr Square". He looks at the art and society as well as the contemporary literature he found during that year. What we get is Barkan looking closely at himself and we learn of his attraction to other men. We go all over Rome with him as he discovers the secrets of the city and of himself. The language of the prose is a bit heavy yet beautiful. Rome to Barkan is magical and we see that as Barkan love Rome, Rome also loved him. The memoir is set against the setting of the universal and everlasting power of Roman art and Barkan explores Rome with candor in order to explore himself in the same way. Do not be misled. However--the book is more than memoir--it is also a culinary look at Rome, literary criticism and travelogue. Anyone who has ever worked in academia knows the scars he must deal with and the cultured halls of universities take a back seat to Barkan's look at one of the "cradles of civilization. Intellectual life is strange and it can be quite lonely. Barkan finds a sense of family in Rome, learns Italian and falls in love and as the year passes, he loses the love he found and he finds his voice as a writer. He returns to America where he celebrates his life by writing this book. Central to the book are irony, humor and misdirection and mistakes. Barkan has two major struggles--being a homosexual and being a Jew and he can only understand these by rediscovering and reinventing his own intellectual passions.

This book is so intelligent and yet so pleasurable, or perhaps I should say so pleasurable and so intelligent, it makes me wish Barkin had more lives and had written memoirs about them all. His writing is perfectly pitched. We get not just the funny, rich, sensuous experiences of encounters with strangers and new wines and new language, but also the other things we all live through, crushes, and loneliness, and embarrassment, related with both unusual honesty and unusual humor. I think its a book for anyone, but if you've ever had a glass of wine that was a complete revelation, or listened over and over to Don Giovanni, or wandered through Rome alone, you really must spend some time in Barkan's wonderful company.

Esthete, epicure, oenophile, academic, and Jewish and gay. Place in the Eternal City for a year and observe the interesting results. This memoir of the sabbatical year of a modest but multifaceted man in Rome is not, one would have to say, an exciting read. For a wild ride, see Felice Picano's Men Who Loved Me. Here is a book for those who appreciate the quieter pleasures: Renaissance sculpture, Roman history, wine, good food, and opera -- at least Mozart's Don Giovanni to which the author refers frequently. As blessedly free of the effete as any book of its type could possibly be, author Barkan describes his eventful Roman year, one with gastronomic and vinous indulgence at its core. We meet his very peculiarly Roman set of new friends, who are of a type that inhabit a very different world and in fact are a very different species than one would encounter in North America. Full of engaging digressions on a myriad of subjects, this book keeps the interest of those with a bent for food and wine, art and music. A glossary for the monolingual would have been nice. A map of Rome with locations noted is unfortunately missing.