Porporino or the Secrets of Naples

The Castrati, Certainly not women, not quite men. Neither adults nor children. A group of half males adored by both the common people and the nobility, a they are described in this bittersweet, decadent, optimistic novel.Winner of France’s Medicis Prize, translated into six languages, having sold over 125,000 copies in France alone, Porporino is at once a dazzling re-creation of an exciting historical period and a serious, startling meditation on our own times.Porporino, the castrato whose flawlessly fictionalized diaries we discover here, is an imaginary character, but most of the people who appear in his memoirs really existed: the Prince of Sansevero who teetered between genius and madness; the beautiful Sarah Goudar and Lady Hamilton, both adventuresses the likes of which were known only in those romantic days; the young Mozart who prophesies a future era of sexual ambiguity; the old and bisexual Casanova; and the illustrious Farinelli, as celebrated an opera singer in his time as Callas is in ours.Porporino is a book overflowing with characters and ideas, each page filled with characters and ideas, each page filled with evens both ordinary and bizarre; it is animated, varied, lyrical, audacious, and just a bit mad; it is a marvelous baroque palace whose ornate portals seem suddenly to open upon the mysteries we experience daily.