image of person or book cover 434645123241587684.jpg
Image courtesy of publisher's website.
y separately published work icon Pietà single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Pietà
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'These are the last days of 1999. At St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, as the world waits for the new millennium, Lucy, a young Australian woman looks up at Michelangelo’s Pietà behind its pane of bullet-proof glass; a red kabbalah string circles her wrist. She has come with the mysterious parcel her recently deceased mother asked her to bring to the box marked POSTE VATICANE.

'But before Rome there is Saint-Cloud. Here, on the outskirts of Paris, Lucy works as an au pair for Jean-Claude and his wife Mathilde. When Mathilde leaves for Central Australia to research the Aboriginal artist Kumanjayi, Lucy’s circle of contacts becomes smaller and strangely intimate: Jean-Claude, the baby Felix for whom she cares, and the couple’s charismatic friend Sébastien, a marble restorer. Yet Lucy’s homesickness for Australia and its vastness haunts her world, surfacing in the memories of her mother, the Australian garden at Empress Joséphine’s Malmaison, and Mathilde’s letters from Alice Springs. 

'Lucy’s mother, Jude, who was a nun in the 1970s, once warned her daughter ‘to be careful what she wished for’. It is a caution that marks but rarely alters the choices these characters make. With lushness and tenderness, and revelation, Fitzgerald’s unforgettable novel Pietà exquisitely captures the glorious and imperfect relationships between parents and children, between art and life.'

Source : publisher's blurb

Notes

  • Dedication : For my parents, who showed me Rome again
  • Epigraph : 

    "Go thou to Rome, - at once the Paradise,

    The grave, the city, and the wilderness...

    Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead

    Thy footsteps to a slope of green access

    Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead,

    A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread."

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Yarraville, Footscray - Maribyrnong area, Melbourne - West, Melbourne, Victoria,: Transit Lounge , 2021 .
      image of person or book cover 434645123241587684.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 251p.p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 1st June 2021.
      ISBN: 9781925760743

Works about this Work

Book Review : Pietà, Michael Fitzgerald Gina Fairley , 2021 review
— Appears in: ArtsHub , October 2021;

— Review of Pietà Michael Fitzgerald , 2021 single work novel

'A restless meditation on the nexus between art and relationships.'

Book Review : Pietà, Michael Fitzgerald Gina Fairley , 2021 review
— Appears in: ArtsHub , October 2021;

— Review of Pietà Michael Fitzgerald , 2021 single work novel

'A restless meditation on the nexus between art and relationships.'

Last amended 23 Sep 2021 15:18:37
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  • Rome,
    c
    Italy,
    c
    Western Europe, Europe,
  • Paris,
    c
    France,
    c
    Western Europe, Europe,
  • 1999
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