"What's Love Got to do with it?"- Tina

Tuscany

     I have to admit that when I started this novella I was expecting a cliché love story that I could fall asleep to, but as I kept reading became enthralled with the realistic portrayal of a doomed love affair made all the more interesting through Hazzard’s subtle, yet powerful writing style. Overall, I feel the story offered a powerful glimpse into the more personal aspects of Italian culture and the interaction of the traveler.

     From the beginning Sophie seems to not be looking to have a genuine relationship with area she is visiting, but instead seems to be thrust into one.  “She wished she were an authentic tourist—an Englishman come to flaunt his reticence, an American secretly hankering for a gift wrapping and matching towels,” Hazzard confides to us about Sophie.  This explains her initial resilience to the advances of the refined Tancredi at first, as the end can be seen before the beginning.  The two are powerless though to prevent the forces of love and each comes to desire that something will bring the inevitable sooner. 

      Sophie hopes Tancredi will not show at the café…he hopes she won’t be there when he comes home.  Hazzard captures the essence of the powerlessness we feel when we fall in love sparring us all the sappiness and clichés that make me cringe.  Instead she gives us a glimpse into the complex motivations of the human nature, influenced by one’s pasts and cultural values, and takes us home without the melodrama.  The anticlimactic ending breaks the mold that pervades our society and gives a realistic and powerful ending.  The novella is almost a Shakespearean tragedy in that we know the affair is doomed to fail, but we keep wishing anyway that they can make it work. 

      The relationship between the past and present make give the story make the story all the more interesting from a psychological standpoint.  The character of Luisa serves as a connection for both Tancredi and Sophie to their parents and their childhoods.  The memories of Tancedi’s father and Sophie’s mother give the essay a sense of the impending end of human relationships.  This mood is even more evident when Luisa dies and forces all the characters to move helplessly into the future.