Blind Contessas New Machine

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Average customer rating 4.4 (5 comments)

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When Carolina tells her parents and her fiancé, Pietro, that she's going blind, they don't believe her. Only her quixotic friend Turri is there for her, so it's no surprise that it's he who invents a writing machine for her. But the relationship between Carolina and Turri is so much more than that gift. As Carolina's vision fades and finally fades away, she learns that she can still see in her dreams, and that there is a rich world there. Confined to the house by her husband, there's not much in her waking world to enjoy. But when she starts to sneak out of the house late at night to meet Turri at her old lake house, her hours gets confused; sleeping and waking, dreams and reality, love and life are all mixed up. The Blind Contessa's New Machine is a charming tale, inventive and bittersweet. Carey Wallace has a beautiful way of describing things�"especially those things that are so easily understood and yet so hard to express. It's a lovely book that reads like a fairy tale.

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A wonderful little book. Amazing to me how freeing this initial invention of the typewriter (by the man who became her lover) was for the Contessa when she went blind. For me, typing was a horrible shackle until the advent of word processing erased my fear of making mistakes (a self-fulfilling prophecy). I was devastated at the end of the book when years later the machine is wantonly destroyed. For me, again, amazing that I would mourn the loss of such a machine. This book is full of intrigue, the reader having only words on the page to create reality, feeling as blind as the Contessa actually was. A book that begs to be read in as few sittings as possible.

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The Book Report: On the eve of her wedding to the most eligible, handsomest bachelor in her small world, Contessa Carolina Fantoni announces to him that she is going blind. He laughs dismissively, kisses her indulgently, thus setting the tone for their entire relationship. After full blindness sets in, her eccentric childhood friend and neighbor, an eccentric married inventor and amateur scientist, creates for her the world's first typewriter, that she may continue to communicate with the outside world. And thus the passionate affair begins, one that would, if either had let it, have destroyed two marriages and possibly four lives. That, in the end, the two people remain married to spouses less than perfect is hardly a new plot or a shocking denoument. But in its bittersweet presentation, it's clear that the author understands the losses of compromise and accommodation that relationships demand of us. My Review: I am mortally afraid of only a few things in this life: 1) Blindness; 2) being eaten by a shark; and 3) suffocating/drowning. My mother went blind a year or more before she died, and it was a torture. She read passionately, and suddenly couldn't; she was never able to adapt to audiobooks. This rings me like a bell, a tocsin of terror that has me sweating and crying as I type this on a c-o-l-d night. And this book's careful, polished prose made that horrific nightmare (literally for me, at least once a year) endurable, survivable, where in less skilled hands I would simply have burned the book and paid the library for it. How she did this is, she presented the onset and completion of the process in a series of vignettes that define what it is to see, and to judge the world on what is seen; Wallace makes that process so arbitrary, so essentially meaningless, that as the Contessa charts her progress into eternal night, she and the reader understand that vision as primary perception is a habit of mind. The Contessa plumbs the darkness fearlessly. She lives in it, after she accepts its permanence, with more grace than she appeared to muster during her sighted years. It's quite a lovely achievement, and it's told in lovely sentences. Wallace, whose author photo rather distressingly resembles a high-school senior picture, had an excellent editor, and handed that editor a lovely book to begin with, you can be sure. This sort of prose doesn't get forged into being on an editor's anvil, it gets the spurs and cracks annealed out of it. Something of the book's raw state remains, thank goodness, because there are some places where opportunities are missed and others are simply AWOL where they would have been welcome. Why thank goodness? Because if this effort were to be perfect, I'd have to hunt this youngster down and kill her in furious writerly envy, that's why. And I don't want to go to jail over a book.

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The Blind Contessa's New Machine - What a clumsy title for a lovely little book! This is the story of Carolina Fantoni, a young contessa, adventurous and independent, who goes blind. No one of her acquaintance knows how to treat her once she goes blind so she becomes totally isolated and trapped in her own home. An intelligent and resourceful woman she learns to travel and fly in her dreams. Then a childhood friend, Turri, an eccentric inventor builds her a typewriter to help her reconnect with the world. The invention of the typewriter has unforeseen consequences and both their lives are changed. To begin with the plot of this book is interesting and unusual and the author makes good use of it. She explores what it must have been like to be so afflicted in a time were was no awareness of the blind and how to help them. Carolina's utter isolation and how she, and the people around her, handle it were fascinating topics to consider. However, what really makes this book is the gorgeous, poetic writing. The details are all written in with an artist's touch until I could clearly see with all my senses. Carolina's lake, in particular, feels like a real place that I could visit anytime. The dust jacket calls this "an iridescent jewel of a novel" and I couldn't agree more!

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The Blind Contessa's New Machine is a perfect summer read ~ actually, it is a perfect anytime read. Based on a true story, it is lyrical, mystical, highly readable and nearly impossible to put down. Treat yourself to this wondrous debut effort.