The Pure Weight of the Heart
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The Pure Weight of the Heart is Antonella Gambotto-Burke's first novel and third book. It peaked at number six on The Sydney Morning Herald's bestseller list. Published by Orion Publishing in London in 1998, was Tatler's Book of the Month, and was translated into German by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (DTV) in 2000.
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[edit] Plot Summary
The novel, narrated in first person and divided into three volumes, is the story of Angelica Botticelli, an Italian-born Australian, and astrophysicist from an apparently wealthy background. Born in Italy to an Austrian mother and Italian father, Angelica is destined for greatness, as we are told by the book's blurb:
"From birth, Angelica is destined to fall in love with an angel. At ten, her blissful childhood is destroyed by the death of her father. Only the stars in the sky at night give her hope. Years later, the adult Angelica, beautiful and gifted, and still a student of the stars, drifts through a world of glamour, power and cruelty, until the night she finally finds her angel, in the heart of the extravagance she has come to despise." (Antonella Gambotto, The Pure Weight Of The Heart, blurb, Orion Publishing 1998)
The novel is divided into three volumes, and the title of each volume directly refers to its main theme: Book One: Grief is a Sphere, which details her childhood, adolescence and reaction to her father's murder. Book Two: A Lycanthropic God, which details her move back to Sydney from London, secretly hostile relationship with her bogan flatmate, Caroline Brine, and discovery of her "angel", the aptly named Gabriel (his surname, Lagen, is an anagram of "angel"), and their ensuing relationship. Book Three: The Bestiary, which details a trip to Chicago to see her mother, brother and mother's second husband, the truly vile Aldo Belva ("belva" means "beast" in Italian), and the characters attending the week-long party, who form "The Bestiary" for which the volume is named.
[edit] Characters
Though Angelica Botticelli is our narrator, certain other characters are quite notable within the text, and indeed the novel is often noted for the razor-sharp prose and social commentary. It is not Angelica's lover, Gabriel Lagen, who draws the most interest, rather her flatmate Caroline Brine, stepfather Aldo Belva, narcissistic first love -- novelist William Grieve, and her unnamed but extravagantly cruel mother, who draw a lot of interest and straddle the boundary between being larger than life and all too real.
[edit] Genre
While often touted as literary prose, The Pure Weight Of The Heart also follows many conventions of the Romance novel genre, with the impossibly beautiful, flawed heroine, and the mysterious, flawed, but incredibly sexy hero, who, after a series of misunderstandings, finally reach a resolve... of sorts.
