The Northern Irish author Maggie O’Farrell (Coleraine, 1972) is widely known in our country. Readers will remember her for novels like The Strange Disappearance of Esme Lennox, The First Hand That Held Mine, or It Has to Be Here, and especially for Hamnet, which garnered unanimous critical favor. O’Farrell made with that book a significant change of register towards historical fiction. She achieved an unforgettable work set in the English countryside and centered on the family of William Shakespeare – whom she did not name as such throughout the book. She gave prominence to her wife, Agnes, and recounted the death of one of her children, Hamnet – a variable in the name of Hamlet, a work that the author would complete four years after that loss.
His new work follows in various aspects the trail marked by that success. El retrato de casada / El retrat de matrimoni is also set in the 16th century –here between 1560 and 1561– and on this occasion the setting is Italy. The protagonist, Lucrezia, a fifteen-year-old girl, is the third daughter of the Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, destined for an early marriage with Alfonso, eldest son of the Duchy of Ferrara, an ambivalent man, with lights and shadows, moved by an obsession with produce an heir.
The author chooses, as she did in her previous work, the point of view of a woman. She offers her protagonists a space to express her concerns, reflections and discernments. She invests in them the time and work to chisel her personalities and so that her figures stand out strongly despite the fact that historically we speak of a time in which power and words were held by men. It is therefore an option that brings the story closer to our days.
Lucrezia reveals herself from birth as a complex being, with a rich inner world, artistic talent, highly perceptive -she listens through the thick walls of the palace-, defiant -she is not afraid of approaching a tigress- and, despite her age , mature to face events.
The Irish author read the poem My Last Duchess, by Robert Browning, in which the Duke of Ferrara remembers his wife immortalized on a canvas by Bronzino, and decided to rewrite that episode. She chooses to look inward, at everyday life and its details. A painting within the story is a combination that has given good literary results – The Table of Flanders, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Goldfinch or The Man in the Red Robe. Here the portrait commissioned by Alfonso is painted by the writer with the images created and the accurate descriptions (“the skirts swollen around, like a dove in the nest”), the result of exhaustive documentation work. She builds a kind of layered x-ray of the character that encompasses the dream world and that of artistic representation (Lucrezia paints small pieces of wood with animals).
We undertake these pages knowing from the start that death will prevail (or not). The text oozes the anguish and sorrow that the black omen causes – the feeling of death that the author has already captured in a moving way in her personal stories in Sigo aquí. The book alternates short chapters in which Lucrezia’s hours end with longer ones that evoke the past. All narrated in the present tense.
O’Farrell is a great storyteller. Here she demonstrates it again, although she does not reach the excellence of her previous work, which shone for the originality of the approach and the psychological depth of the characters, with the shadow of the English playwright in the background. But this is a remarkable book with interesting characters and intrigues that will provide readers with a good time.
Maggie O’Farrell. The wedding portrait / The marriage portrait
Translation into Spanish by C. Cardeñoso and into Catalan by M. Rubió. Books of the Asteroid / L’Altra. 400 pages 22.75 euros
