Sicilian Odyssey

Novelist Francine Prose's slim but not slight book is filled with insights and evocative appreciation of the often-invaded island of Sicily and its hybrid art and cuisine. Her book provides a good introduction to Sicily, and also provides many interesting reflections for those who have visited the island and are familiar with the literature about it. _Sicilian Odyssey_ lacks the familiarity based on long-time residence underlying Peter Robb's involuted and near-desparing _Midnight in Sicily_ , Daphne Phelps's The Most Beautiful House in Sicily, or Mary Taylor Simeti's _On Persephone's Island_. Prose's travel book is, however, much better informed than Lawrence Durrell's entertaining _Sicilian Carousel_, but there are not any characters as vivid in Prose's book as some of those in the other books I've mentioned. I think that Prose's book is a useful introduction to Sicily that also contains much of interest to those with previous experience of Sicily and the writings about it in English. She writes acutely about food (rightly summing up that "if freshness [of ingredients] is the hallmark of Sicilian cuisine, subtlety is not").and art and architecture, with insightful bits of appreciation of Sicilian writers and photographers and of what Caravaggio did while on Sicily. Also, her photographs (reproduced in black-and-white) are sharp and well illustrate some of the points in her text.