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    Florence In Ecstasy
    Florence In Ecstasy
    Florence In Ecstasy
    Audiobook11 hours

    Florence In Ecstasy

    Written by Jessie Chaffee

    Narrated by Jennifer Jill Araya

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2017

    “Chaffee’s fierce debut brings Hannah’s struggles, discoveries, and sweet triumphs to life.” —Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl and The Woman Upstairs

     “There’s an absorbing story here, a love story, a coming-of-age story, a gorgeous portrait of the city itself, its beauty and its decadence, but there’s also the thrilling glimpse of a brilliant young writer just setting out.” —National Book Award winner Alice McDermott in The Atlantic

     A young American woman arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But Hannah is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout with starvation that has left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food—as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God.

    Hannah joins a local rowing club, where Francesca, a welcoming but predatory Milanese, and Luca, a seemingly steady Florentine with whom she becomes involved, draw her into Florence’s vibrant present: the complex social dynamics at the club, soccer mania, eating, drinking, sex, an insatiable insistence on life. But Hannah is also rapt by the city’s past—the countless representations of beauty, the entrenched conflicts of politics and faith, and the lore of the mystical saints, women whose self-imposed isolation and ecstatic searches for meaning through denial illuminate the seduction of her own struggles.

    Both sides pull Hannah in: challenging her, defeating her, lifting her up. And when a figure from her past life in Boston reappears, threatening the delicate balance of her present, Hannah’s feverish personal excavation becomes caught up with the long history of women’s contention with body and spirit, desire and death.

    A vivid, visceral debut echoing the novels of Jean Rhys, Elena Ferrante, and Catherine Lacey, Florence in Ecstasy gives us an arresting new vision of a woman’s attempt to find meaning—and find herself—in an unstable world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Productions
    Release dateFeb 9, 2021
    ISBN9781094415123
    Author

    Jessie Chaffee

    Jessie Chaffee was awarded a Fulbright Grant to complete Florence in Ecstasy and was the writer-in-residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Slice, Bluestem, Global City Review, and The Sigh Press, among other places. She received her MFA from the City College of New York, and she lives in New York City, where she is an editor at Words Without Borders. Find her at www.JessieChaffee.com.

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    Reviews for Florence In Ecstasy

    3.5/5

    85 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The character’s distress is acutely felt. Some of the narrative is overdone. The symbolism is perfect. While I don’t like endings that are too trite and saccharine, I wish the end would have tied a few things up. It was a messy, dark, historic, chaotic book that was just great. A subject that is often not discussed regarding adult women made the main character even more interesting The backdrop of Italy was bellissimo.
    • 5/5
      Lovely descriptions of Florence but a serious topic. Good characterisation
    • 4/5
      I didn’t read what it was about-lesson learned. Lots of Italian.
    • 4/5
      Seems honest. Is engrossing. Ending vague, as it should be.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Simply beautiful. Loved the book, the feelings, the emotions, the dilemmas , the anxieties of hannah are portrayed so vividly and the descriptions of firenze took me back to Italy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A vivid account of a truly tortured person and her very real problem! Excellent reading from the performer!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The story gives a good description of the main characters, and the storyline was a good one. It's just that there was too many Italian phrases with no translations and I felt like her inner thoughts started being redundant. I Sorento too much time fast forwarding the story to avoid it.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      When you strip a life clean what is left? This book is an an honest account of a women struggling with her mind and body to fill the gap of spirit. ??

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This novel remained in me long after I'd finished it. Quiet but powerful, heart-breaking but humorous, with writing so delicious I couldn't decide whether to savor slowly or gulp down all at once. It took a subject I mistakenly thought I understood and turned it upside down. The writing is gorgeous, and the landscape of Florence exquisitely rendered. You feel, hear, smell, and taste along with Hannah; Jessie Chaffee has that unique ability to draw you so close to her narrator you exist on the pages with her. Reading this book is like living it, and, as only the finest novels can manage, finishing it is like leaving a bit of your soul behind.

      3 people found this helpful