Heloise and Bellinis

A Novel

By: Harry Cipriani

Narrated by: Elenna Stauffer

This charmingly inventive, deliciously improbable seriocomic novel opens at 11 o’clock, on the morning of July 14, in the year 2000, on the Avenue d’Angleterre in Beirut. Private George Smith of the American Peace-Keeping Forces in Lebanon is breathlessly chasing a hand grenade - which he threw in the line of duty - down the street. It seems he forgot to pull the pin. At that very moment, one Heloise Svejk is crossing the street from east to west, bearing an empty coffin on her shoulder. From this unlikely encounter is born one of the great love stories of the first year of the 21st century, not completely unworthy of that of Heloise’s namesake nine centuries earlier.

Private Smith is a reasonably sane soldier, as sane at least as any oversized American of mixed Swedish and Austro-Hungarian descent from Alabama who has not been with a beautiful woman for two years can be. Now Smith knows, inevitably and irrevocably, why fate has posted him to this godforsaken city. He disappears with Heloise for all the right reasons, but for General Custer, Private Smith’s commanding officer, when you’re gone for five days you’re gone for good, fella, and Washington is so informed.

When news spreads that Smith is not dead but only hopelessly in love, the plot does not merely thicken but gets downright sticky. What will Custer tell the President? What will he tell George’s next of kin, and how will he get back the posthumous award for unusual bravery he sent her? And yes, what about this Heloise they are all drooling over? In page after page, chapter after chapter, these and countless other cosmic questions are discussed and dealt with - with mixed results, as the author is quick to point out.

Interspersed with the chapters are intermezzi in which the author muses and comments on George; Heloise; life; love; Harry’s Bar; his father, Giuseppe; peach-nectar-and-champagne cocktails (aka bellinis); and Cousin Wanda - not to mention Abelard himself, the inquisitive, inflexible, and highly unimaginative friend of the author to whom the intermezzi are addressed.

©1986, 1991, 2011 Arrigo Cipriani (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

odd but good

I had Bellinis w my wife in Venice on our honeymoon. book is strange, mildly irritating, but very enjoyable.

What the ever loving twisted Benny Hill was that?!

Scattershot, aimless story of American soldier George who falls for Eloise after a chance encounter and goes A.W.O.L. in Europe during the World War. The story is told through (A) chapters detailing a found, but incomplete story written by who knows and (B) “intermermezzi” (or interruptions) of letters written by bar owner Harry, a smarmy, lecherous, opinionated snoop narrated in a thick caricature of an Italian (French?) accent.

With each successive intermezzi, the ick factor increases as Harry tells us things about George and Eloise’s romance that a bartender shouldn’t be privy to, and goes off on tangents concerning various women Harry has groped, or had “primordial” sex with, or who are poor because they don’t let men pay for women’s meals. It felt like the old Benny Hill show, with the burlesque and double entendres... but what was perceived as “funny” then just comes off as distasteful now. The weird factor increases as we meet General Custer, who also has an odd romance/thoughts about women while scheming how to cover up George being considered dead instead of A.W.O.L.

Then this story goes off the rails with 22 minutes left into WTF territory. Waxing poetic about lips and nipples gives way to a bonkers sex scene that sees a man plunging between a woman’s legs, with talk of her smelling like the “pungent, intense smell of Earth, rotting at dawn in the first rays of the sun, still not hot enough to assimilate the damp offal of nocturnal animals” before Harry goes off on another tangent about the unfortunate use of bidets in negating the essence of excrement connected to sex. What?!

But, wait, it gets crazier! In the final 10 minutes, we get a frenetic hodgepodge of what became of George and Eloise, jumping ahead in time, recapping their life, and ending a half century later with mushroom cloud explosion from nowhere. An actual bomb? A metaphorical bomb? Who knows. And, still Harry in his intermezzi talks about Dante’s inferno not being plausible because it doesn’t account for the excrement... and instead offering up his own idea of the afterlife, where he can meet up with George and Eloise. What did I just listen to?!