⁠ "𝘞𝘩𝘰 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶? 𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦? How much of it was choice and how much accident?
These are a novelists’ questions, and the answers inevitably take the form of a story. Condemned as we are to live in time and space with a definitive beginning and an inevitable end, a continuously unravelling fabric of happenstance and conscious decision results in what might be called the plot of a life. A small oversight, a missed opportunity, a flawed, impulsive decision, the content of a moment, can redirect the course, for good or evil. Everyone acknowledges this."

𝘐 𝘎𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘐𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘠𝘰𝘶 by Valerie Martin

★★★★☆ (3.5)

Read this book if you’re interested in:

✓ historical fiction
✓ Italian culture⁠
✓ life in Italy during WWII
✓ the Tuscan countryside
✓ family saga
✓ questions of ownership and loyalty

If you decide to read I Give It to You, do so within short pauses, as the story is told: “as heard”. Thus, the presented events do not follow a chronological order. Otherwise, it might get very confusing. Which leads me to my second thought: this book requires your full attention. Reading a chapter between other tasks definitely didn’t work for me. The book traces a story that spans about 80 years.

In I Give It to You, Jan, an American professor who writes historical fiction, rents the limonaia (lemon house) of Villa Chiara. She plans to write a Mussolini biography, combining this joyful activity with thorough research, sightseeing and indulgence in tranquillity.

Villa Chiara is a Tuscan ancestral home, owned by a wealthy Italian family, the Salviati. Their golden days come to an end as the realities of life in post-World War II Italy unfold before the remnants of their shattered security. Indeed, as the war turmoil wreaks havoc on their already tenuous relationships, their hard times begin even before that.  

During her Tuscan summer, Jan befriends Beatrice, her impressive hostess, who confides in her about her family’s complicated past, her life as a student of American literature in Boston and the uncertain future of her beloved Villa Chiara. 

Tension runs through the entire book. Although a piece of the story unfolds in each chapter, I constantly had the feeling that I was waiting for something bigger—a revelation of some kind. As I was reading, I had many stories in my head about each family member, and I struggled to find the connection. It did reveal itself after a short time, but I still felt overwhelmed. 

Martin’s writing style is superb; she writes masterfully and makes you feel the smallest detail. As a non-native speaker, I struggled with some of the descriptions and re-read entire paragraphs. Of course, this is simply because Martin has the extensive vocabulary that I obviously lack. 

Overall, I have mixed opinions about this book. I like Valerie Martin’s writing style, and I like the story’s diversity, but (if that makes the slightest sense) I wasn’t too fond of the way it was told.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

This was my first Valerie Martin book and I will be keen to delve into her backlist, as I really enjoyed this story set in Tuscany (and a bit in the US). A creative writing academic spends her summers at a colleague's colleague's Villa, and over the years learns stories of the former aristocratic family and their downfall after the fascist regime. In particular, Jan is intrigued by the story of Beatrice's uncle Sandro who was murdered in the driveway of the villa, and this story and his ghost are threaded through the novel. Ghosts of stories. What is real, and what is fictionalised? Even when we receive stories from our ancestors they are partial, or reframed to shape how they became the inheritor of such stories. And what happens when we share those stories with others -- are they no longer ours, even if they are significantly remodelled and reimagined? I love the parallels drawn between property and stories here. So much of the tragedy of this family saga comes from the right to directly inherit, and the means used to control those lines of inheritance. And interlopers, who divert the course of a property's story.

This is an absorbing and sweeping account of one Italian family's journey through the wonder and mire of twentieth century history. It was special not only for its transportive evocation of Italy, but also for its portrayal of Italy's astonishing fascist past. A complex and entertaining family saga told with great emotion and deft penmanship. Highly recommended!

There is a lot of lovely writing here, and the descriptions of Tuscany are oh-so transporting. Just the idyll I needed in Covid Lockdown. But I kept waiting for the thing to get going and it never really did. It's not so much a plot, as a series of conversations and encounters in which the history of one Italian family is recounted, for research purposes, for the benefit of a novelist friend of one of the family.

I chose to read it because of the suggestion that it was going to deal with who owns the stories we live/tell. Unfortunately, by the time this kicks it, it felt too little too late. In many ways, the novel ends at the point I was hoping it would begin. In fairness, I am probably not the right reader for this novel and so I have upgraded my rating from 3 stars to 4.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for letting me see an advance copy of this novel.

I Give it To You by Valerie Martin
Valerie Martin is an author I enjoy and it has been a while since I have read anything by her. This novel is set in Tuscany and concerns Jan a professor of creative writing from Pennsylvania who has come to Italy to stay in an apartment owned by a friend of a friend. She begins to talk to Beatrice and becomes fascinated by the story of her aristocratic family . She listens to Beatrice as she recounts her stories and Jan later transforms these stories into a novel.
I was fascinated with the way the history of the family is revealed over the years and as always with Valerie Martin the writing is beautiful. I would recommend this novel to others and thank the author, the publishers and Net Galley for the opportunity to read this novel in return for an honest review.

Why do people choose to write, discuss, investigate, study historical periods, times and places unconnected to themselves and to their own heritage, history, country and continent they come from? Why would an Italian have to be annoyed with an American writing about Mussolini decades after World War II? Actually, there shouldn’t be a reason. I, for one, am often annoyed with interpretations of European historical and present time coming from outside Europe when they show fundamental misunderstanding of it, a complete lack of understanding. A good question is: why not? Everybody has the right to write, discuss, investigate and study anything their heart desires.
That is what I found most refreshing about this novel: it’s about an American writer Jen investigating and writing about Italy, its history and present. She has an American perspective on all things: on World War II and life in general. She knows it, she doesn’t try to run away from it. We see things only the way we are able to see things: through our own eyes and through our own perspective. She knows her views might not be authentic and regarded as true, right or equivalent with the views of native Italians, but that isn’t important at all.
That is the same way we tell stories, the way we write fiction. That is a view inherent only to ourselves, a character can not be “false”, it is the way the writer makes it, not the way the person was in reality. Because, fiction is not reality, adding our own way of seeing things, our perspective, our historical, cultural and personal heritage to reality isn’t reality any more.
I Give It to You talks about the process of writing, making reality fiction, the relationship the author has with his “real life” characters. What does stealing somebody’s life mean. What does giving a story of somebody’s life to an author to write about mean exactly and can it be true.
It talks about war, tyranny, fascism, nazism, Italian and German complicated ties during the war, tragic human stories, mental illness, forbidden love, nobility, family, the way families and houses change, live through time together and apart.
Betrayals, politics that always exist in families, the way spouses rarely understand each other, which goes for mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, mothers and sons.
The structure of the novel is a bit confusing, in the beginning it doesn’t seem apparent where the storytelling will go, but in the end it all comes together better than it seemed. We follow Jan, her writing, her fictional stories about Beatrice’s real life, Italian heritage and family history. It is a combination of their dialogues and Jan’s fictional stories that merge into an and into the novel in the end.
I found the descriptions a bit tedious, partly unnecessary, not giving the impression they wanted to give. I have a feeling the whole novel could and should have come together better, needed a bit more work, more coherence and more of a clear idea where it was heading and what the author wanted to do with the idea. In general, it is an interesting novel with a couple of ideas that are food for thought: history, WWII, family dynamics, storytelling, fiction and reality.

I really enjoyed this story and I strongly recommend it.
The storytelling is excellent, the characters are fleshed out and interesting, the historical background is realistic and vivid.
I loved how well the author wrote her characters and their story.
It's an excellent read and I strongly recommend it.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This was an enjoyable Italian family saga, one of the favorite things I like to read. It was very well done, combined with some history. So, I'd highly recommend if you like multi-generational family sagas.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

Great book with lots of twists and turns. Good style of writing and kept me wanting to read more. Enjoyed the characters and the story flowed well

Have you ever dreamed about going to Italy and living in a majestic Tuscan villa? Perhaps real life travel is impossible right now, but if you’re looking for a great armchair escape then this book may just be the one for you – I was immediately smitten by its magnificent setting, and the dark family secrets it promised to uncover.

So, did it keep its promise? Partly, yes, partly, no. Let me elaborate. I GIVE IT TO YOU is the story of an American academic and writer, Jan Vidor, who spends a summer at her friend Beatrice’s family residence in Tuscany, the magnificent Villa Chiara. Over the centuries, the house has borne witness to many of the aristocratic Salviati family’s dramas, including the death of Beatrice’s gentle uncle Sandro in the driveway of his home. Over the course of Jan’s stay, Beatrice reveals much of her family’s troubled history, which is grounded in the privilege of the Italian upper classes. As Jan listens with fascination, Beatrice casually dismisses her family’s story with: “I give it to you.” But what does this really mean? Is Jan now the owner of the tale to do with as she wishes?

Over the course of the book, we meet many of Beatrice’s family members and find out about their often tragic fates. Beatrice herself has an interesting tale to tell. After a love-hate relationship with her mother, she emigrated to America and found herself in a doomed marriage to an alcoholic, which produced her (now adult) son David, the last of the family line. To be honest, whilst I felt for the young Beatrice who had set off to start a new life in a far away land, every adult in the story apart from the doomed Sandro was not exactly likeable. Jan seems to take it all in her stride, the family’s aristocratic arrogance, their internal family struggles, the coldness that exists between surviving family members. This lack of emotion on Jan’s part was probably the novel’s biggest downfall for me. I ever really got a good sense of who Jan really was, as we are not privy to her emotions and thoughts, merely the emotionless recounting of the family’s various stories. If Jan had any thoughts about them, she does not share them with the reader. I had the sense that the holiday in Tuscany was her getaway, her bubble in time and space. It existed so separate from her own life that it almost took part in another universe in which her own emotions and opinions never come to play – even though she reflects often about her regrets about her poor grasp of the Italian language that makes her feel self conscious and uncomfortable among the locals. Another puzzle for me was her friendship with Beatrice, which was somewhat remote and cool. If Beatrice really shared her family’s most intimate details, we don’t ever see the emotional connection there that would draw the two women together.

However, the beautiful setting of the rural Italian countryside and the charming Villa Chiara made up for the characters’ lack of emotional connection. I could vividly picture the grand house throughout the last 100 years of history, which saw the tragic demise of a few of Beatrice’s family members. Sandro, who was probably the only “nice” member of the family, touched my heart, and I found his story the saddest of all.

All in all, as a query into the ethics of who owns a story – the person who has lived it or the novelist who was gifted it – the book did not fully deliver for me, partly due to my emotional disconnection to Jan, the writer. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the armchair travel to Tuscany and found some aspects of the Salviati family’s history fascinating, including a young Beatrice’s quest to start a new life in America. Too bad that the only legacy that was left was the haughty and pompous David, who I could not root for, which left me somewhat cold as to the last part of the novel. If you are a reader who appreciates a good family saga spanning various major events in history, combined with delicious armchair travel, then this book may be just right for you. I really enjoyed the author’s gift for storytelling and will make sure to look up her other works!

This is a story about a story, which sounds tedious and this easily could have been - but it actually reads very well.

A really gripping family saga in a variety of colorful settings. None of the characters are transparent, if they have secrets or hidden agendas, it's only apparent at the cut-throat moment. All are spectacularly fleshed out. The story of the Salviati family fluctuates between time and place, from turn-of-the-century Florence or Fascist Italy to 1950s America. Our narrator's filling in of the gaps in this strange and dark family history will not change history itself or dictate the present, it is only for her insatiable curiosity about the complexities of this aristocratic family. We witness the story first-hand, but the events are not actually what we are here to see.

The ending takes a meta-fictional turn, and leaves us wondering if the book we have just read is the version Jan (our narrator) eventually drafts. Jan says the thought never occurred to her until she unearthed her travel notes, almost ten years after her original visit, but during the actual events she is so enraptured by the Salviati history that she dreams Sandro Salviati is banging on the window of the limonaia, and when someone tells you a story about people they know, how many of us make notes about these people, and connect them?

"Giacomo Salviati = Flavia ? Children: Sandro, Valeria, Celestia, Marco and Maria

Marco = ? Children: Luca and Mimma
Maria = ? - Beatrice"

Perhaps the most telling line is: "As Beatrice told me stories about her family, I found myself thinking of them as characters in a complex narrative. "

I was pleasantly surprised by this read. It's not what you expect at any point, and what we think of as the traditional, exciting, and visually spectacular story - is just the back-light. Who owns a story, or even history? What is ours to interpret or retell? Just because a story is eventful, does it need telling? If someone bestows us with a story as a gift, what are you allowed to do with it?

Some interesting questions (for me, anyway) in an age where everything, even misery, is ripe for making in to a book, from misfortune and murder, to illness and ignorance.

This was an absorbing novel, set in Italy's recent past. A creative writing professor, Jan, visits a colleague's family home in Italy, and gets drawn into her history. She returns over the decades and more of the history is revealed, as well as the lessening of the family fortunes as more of the house and land is sold off, renovated by the former working tenants, or inherited by others. I found the main character Beatrice's story of moving away to America, her studies and marriage, to be fascinated and well told, and the second half of the book, taking about the immediate post war reckoning with fascism and patens in Italy, while a little grander in scale was still interesting and well written. I was totally absorbed in the fortunes of the family, and loved the descriptions of the writer's Tuscan visits. I felt I was at Villa Chiara, eating pastries and drinking wine!

3.5 rounded down

An accomplished novel of family and stories within stories, I Give It To You follows writer Jan as she travels to Italy to stay in a beautiful villa in Tuscany. Here Jan meets her host, Beatrice, a woman who she quickly befriends and who regales her with stories of the villa itself which then lead into tales of her family and its various members. Jan becomes fascinated with these stories - many of which are told in third person within the novel - and later weaves them into a book after Beatrice says to her "You like this story? I give it to you." This sentence comes of relevance towards the end of the novel where we as readers are forced to consider the consequences of Jan's (and Beatrice's) actions, and question who really "owns" a story.

While I enjoyed the novel overall I didn't quite believe in the friendship between Jan and Beatrice as much as I felt the author wanted me to. The setting was well depicted and the individual stories held my interest, but at times the book felt overly long whilst also not going into enough detail which was a shame. That said, I'm still interested to check out more of the author's work, and I'm glad I took a chance on this one.

This is a novel about family, friendship and the power of storytelling. Beatrice, a descendant of once wealthy Italian aristocratic family rents a cottage by her family’s Tuscan villa to Jan, an American novelist and college professor. Jan, in Italy to research for a book on Mussolini, becomes more interested in stories about Beatrice’s family, especially stories from WWII. Noting her interest, Beatrice tells Jan “I give it to you” after one particular story. Over the course of the summer and the years that follow, the two women become friends, meeting every now and then in the US where Beatrice also teaches Italian at a university and sometimes back at the villa in Tuscany. Interspersed with the times they spend together are stories of Beatrice’s family that span the course of the twentieth century.

Initially, I was very much drawn to the title of the book. Publisher’s description was also intriguing, conveying certain expectations. So I was reading expectantly and soon found myself drawn in and very much enjoying the book but for completely different reasons. The story of the Salviati family and of Beatrice’s life was fascinating, she is a very well realised character. This is a very good summer read, the landscape, the people, the wonderful Italian food. Great lockdown escapism albeit set against the backdrop of Mussolini and fascism and Italy’s post-war recovery. A compelling story, beautifully told.

My thanks to Serpent’s Tail, Profile Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review I Give It To You.

This is the story of an aristocratic Florentine family’s fortunes before and after WWII, during Mussolini’s time and in the aftermath of his fall. The Mussolini connection attracts the attention of a young American academic who begins to spend summers in the family’s Tuscan villa as paying guest of an Italian colleague, Beatrice, one of the few remaining members of the once-powerful Salviati family. Beatrice is a vibrant, independent, educated woman who has made her life in America but retains close ties to her Italian home. I enjoyed all the detail of Jan’s gradual discovery of Italian traditional ways of life over years of visits. From Beatrice and her cousin, she pieces together the family history, some sad examples of squabbling over inheritance and blighted lives along the way, and finds it fascinating, worthy of a work of fiction. Of course it is.

Jan, the narrator, is a non-character, just an observer really, and we don’t learn much of her personality or her life. I can see the point of that - she is relating others’ stories as they told them to her and she (or rather Valerie Martin) writes well in the different characters’ voices, but I found it frustrating, especially at the very end when all of a sudden she is trying to decide whether or not to publish a novel about the Salviati family. That aspect, the debate about ownership of a story, tacked on in the very last pages, perhaps to keep Jan part of the action to the end, is almost an irrelevance by this time. Strange that the publisher’s blurb should highlight it so strongly.

I think this is one of those books where the blurb doesn't give a good sense of what we're getting: essentially, this is a multi-generational family saga following an Italian family through the twentieth century. The history is slightly displaced as it's partly told as inset narratives in the 3rd person, alternating with the 'present' 1st person where a novelist becomes fascinated with the family via her friendship with Beatrice, one of the women in the family, who recounts stories that Jan later turns into a novel.

The intriguing hook of the blurb, that this is about complicated questions of who owns stories and who has the right to retell them only lightly rears its head and then becomes a plot point at 98% and isn't treated with any depth.

So this is certainly enjoyable and is especially good on the complexities of Italy's fascist past (think a lighter, swifter, more popular and compact version of the Ferrara novels of Giorgio Bassani]) - just re-set your expectations to a superior family saga rather than anything more probing: 3.5 stars rounded up.

Italian setting brought me here and my goodness, it was such an excellent decision.
One lovely summer an American academic named Jan gets to rent out a room in a Tuscan villa. There she is to work on her book about Moussolini but ends up taking a life-long liking to espresso while she listens to stories of war-time fascism and how the volantile political climate has long been affecting Italy and its nobility.

Jan’s summer escape tenancy turns into something of a quest for objective truth. Not in a way a crazed detective cracks a case based on their ‘wall of crazy’ but in a way a persistent observer will eventually notice patterns and may see things a non-bystander never would. As she also befriends the villa’s owner Beatrice (do pronounce her name in Italian, it’s just so much better this way) and their friendship continues for years, her visits to the villa do not let up either. Each visit produces new interesting facts or observations.

This book snuck up on me. I have never before heard of the author (who apparently has won Orange Prize in the past and that is no small feat), nor have I read any of her past books. I did want to read this and picked it out on NetGalley because the cover reminded me of Italian countryside and it looked like historical fiction to me. I was right on both fronts. Interest sparked, I dived into it one night and couldn’t put it down till I hit the 30% mark. And it was nearing 4am on a work day!

Full transparency, the only character I definitely liked was Beatrice. Jan was an excellent observer, a trait a good storyteller needs to possess; unfortunately for me, she also came across as incredibly aloof and withdrawn and I’m just not a fan of this personality trait. I kept thinking she was sad all the time. That perhaps wasn’t the author’s intention or there was no particular intent in making her this or that. Still, I was desperate to know any strap of information that would tell me a thing about her aside from her work as an academic. Beatrice was an academic and how bustling with life and energy she was! But as most of the story was written from Jan’s POV, it also served for an efficient and fault-proof way to tell a story that needed to be voiced in an objective way. I understand that it wasn’t Jan’s story insomuch as she was a tool the story got to be told through. (Hence me chunking off a star what would otherwise have been a 5 star read.)

„I Give It To You” is a book you read for the real-life slow burning drama of the villa and the family that owns it. It’s a delightful story written with omnipresent penmanship skill but it is a sad one. The resentment being the chief emotion wreaking havoc on the villa and its family and it shows and it burns as you read but you also can’t get enough so you keep flipping the Kindle pages. I loved to learn much of the inner workings of Italy post-war and to read about that time in general. I have not had much of that style of storytelling - of real historical events getting intertwined with stories of people you may not like much but you nonetheless want them to be okay and free of pain. You want them to succeed and thrive.

We can safely assume that we always, whether we want to or not, choose sides. We root for one character or another. I tried not to but I did, too. Luckily it didn’t diminish my enjoyment of this book and I will remember it with great fondness, even if with a healthy dash of melancholy as well. Sadness or not however, was there ever anything more glorious than a real Italian espresso drunk with a cornetto on a side? I don’t think so. Especially if we picture two inteligent women conversing about life or nothing at all important (and yet!) in a garden of peaches, one listening closely, the other smiling indulgently.

This book, like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, is a book about books - about writing, authors, and truth. It executes with less aplomb however, primarily because the narrator’s motivations are never properly examined or contextualised. The narrator, Jan, is an American academic and novelist who spends a summer renting an outhouse of a villa in the Tuscan countryside. Her host is Beatrice, an academic from old aristocratic Italian lineage whose stories of her own and her family’s past begin to enthral Jan. Two things in particular occupy Jan’s thoughts - the family’s role during WWII (there is a fascist uncle) dovetailing with her own fascination with Mussolini, and the stirrings of class upheaval on the bucolic estate which she compares repeatedly to the painting Il Quarto Stato. Yet, frustratingly, she is never brought to account nor inclined to reflect on her romanticising of Italy and her reductive view of Beatrice and family as Old World stereotypes. There is only a flicker of recognition in the book’s last pages, when her retelling of Beatrice’s stories in a novel is coldly received. Yet without any perspective other than Jan’s, it remains difficult to hold her to account for the miniaturisation of far more interesting characters than herself.