Blood & Beauty

The Borgias; A Novel

De: Sarah Dunant

Narrado por: Edoardo Ballerini

Named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews

The New York Times best-selling author of the acclaimed Italian Renaissance novels - The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan, and Sacred Hearts - has an exceptional talent for breathing life into history. Now Sarah Dunant turns her discerning eye to one of the world’s most intriguing and infamous families - the Borgias - in an engrossing work of literary fiction.

By the end of the 15th century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched by its brutality and corruption, nowhere more than in Rome and inside the Church. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy as Alexander VI, he is defined not just by his wealth or his passionate love for his illegitimate children, but by his blood: He is a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If the Borgias are to triumph, this charismatic, consummate politician with a huge appetite for life, women, and power must use papacy and family - in particular, his eldest son, Cesare, and his daughter Lucrezia - in order to succeed.

Cesare, with a dazzlingly cold intelligence and an even colder soul, is his greatest - though increasingly unstable - weapon. Later immortalized in Machiavelli’s The Prince, he provides the energy and the muscle. Lucrezia, beloved by both men, is the prime dynastic tool. Twelve years old when the novel opens, hers is a journey through three marriages, and from childish innocence to painful experience, from pawn to political player.

Stripping away the myths around the Borgias, Blood & Beauty is a majestic novel that breathes life into this astonishing family and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex and relentless.

Praise for Blood & Beauty

“The Machiavellian atmosphere - hedonism, lust, political intrigue - is magnetic.... Readers won’t want the era of Borgia rule to end.” (People, four stars)

“Dunant transforms the blackhearted Borgias and the conniving courtiers and cardinals of Renaissance Europe into fully rounded characters, brimming with life and lust.” (The New York Times Book Review)

“Like Hilary Mantel with her Cromwell trilogy, [Sarah] Dunant has scaled new heights by refashioning mythic figures according to contemporary literary taste. This intellectually satisfying historical saga, which offers blood and beauty certainly, but brains too, is surely the best thing she has done to date.” (The Miami Herald)

“Compelling female players have been a characteristic of Dunant’s earlier novels, and this new offering is no exception.... The members of this close-knit family emerge as dynamic characters, flawed but sympathetic, filled with fear and longing.” (The Seattle Times)

©2013 Sarah Dunant (P)2013 Random House

Superb!

What made the experience of listening to Blood & Beauty the most enjoyable?

The writing is exquisite - mellifluous and poetic. Her psychological take on the situations and characters are interesting and plausible.

What did you like best about this story?

The character development, the plot and Dunant's skill in keeping me fully engrossed.

What about Edoardo Ballerini’s performance did you like?

His performance was impeccable and added tremendously to the richness of the story and my immersion into the characters.

Any additional comments?

I enjoyed this book so much that I am unable to read another historical fiction novel (my favorite genre) at this time. Blood and Beauty is so well crafted that it will be a tough act to follow.

The best

I loved every minute of this story at times finding it impossible to stop listening. I couldn’t believe how quickly it was over. I will be looking for the continued story hopefully by the same author and reader they are both the best. The description and detail are perfect I could see it all like I was there. A great book and performance.

Start with Other Dunant Books

I was disappointed with this novel. I've read and loved several other books by Sarah Dunant, but this one didn't live up to the others. My feeling is that she got so involved with her research and wanting to retell the historical events from the point of view she had adopted, that she somehow forgot to create credible and fully formed characters. In wanting to present a more "balanced" view of the Borgias, who, based on recent historical research, appear not to have been the monsters they've been made out to be—indeed, the current thinking is they behaved in a way congruent with the times they lived in—the story seemed to me to lack the excitement and spice one would have expected from the title. Yes, there is murder and plenty of blood is spilled, but somehow all this seems to be at a remove, as seen from the eyes of a historian rather than a talented fiction writer. While her other books have all carried me away and made me want to follow the flow of her stories and live with the characters for a while, this one felt stiff and formulaic and frankly, rather boring in the end. I'm still giving it a decent rating because I'm a great lover of historical fiction and Dunant certainly did her homework in that sense, but this is not the book I would recommend to someone new to her writing.

Breath of Fresh Air

If you could sum up Blood & Beauty in three words, what would they be?

Excellent Historical Fiction

Who was your favorite character and why?

Lucretia --- because Dunant gives her a modern feminist strength, within the restraints of the patriarchal culture of 15th Century Europe and within the Roman Catholic Church.

What does Edoardo Ballerini bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I enjoyed his narration of Beautiful Ruins, and he didn't disappoint here, except I had to get the image of Carlo Tursi out of my head and replace it with Rodrigo and Cesare Borgia! He is terrific with Italian themed stories. His use of the language gives it all its beauty and charm.

If you could take any character from Blood & Beauty out to dinner, who would it be and why?

Tough choice --- only one, probably Lucretia because of her natural resilience and depth. Other wise it would be fascinating to have dinner with Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, the soon to be Pope Julius II. That would be a dinner of first rate minds and devious temperaments ---- their nonverbal communication would be more fascinating than the words they would share.

Any additional comments?

Dunant brings a fresh view of the Borgias to the over-saturated media versions on Showtime and the BBC. Her history seeks authenticity not sensationalism though rumor and innuendo. The Borgias were plenty corrupt without the titillation of incest, suspected not proven.

Great Story...

If you could sum up Blood & Beauty in three words, what would they be?

Captivating and a well told story.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Blood & Beauty?

all of it

Which character – as performed by Edoardo Ballerini – was your favorite?

All of them

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

This book both made me laugh and cry.

scandalous history at its best

What did you love best about Blood & Beauty?

The insight into how this family loved and schemed

What other book might you compare Blood & Beauty to and why?

N/a

Have you listened to any of Edoardo Ballerini’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

When lucrezia's husband was killed

Any additional comments?

Wonderful narrator

Narrator

Operatic delivery was well suited to the subject matter and enlivened the more dry aspects of the story

Hatt

Ohhh, the Borgias! An interview i heard with Dunavant persuaded my buy. Ballerini is fabulous!

Good story but could have been so much better

I love Sarah Dunant but I felt very detached from this story despite the subject matter that I loved due to the way she wrote it in third person narration. It keeps it too unemotional and detached and even more so with the narrator who was very blah and read each sentence like a newspaper reporter almost. I kept listening due to interest in the subject and will listen to the follow up novel for the same reason but compared to Dunant’s others works which are wonderfully engrossing I feel like she missed the mark in trying a different style of writing with this one.

Flowery prose, not much substance

I fully admit that I’m on a Borgia binge right now because I finished Soryo’s series and I’m desperate for more. So far, every other book I’ve read has felt shockingly flat and empty compared to Soryo’s. At first, this one felt like the exception. A deeper look into Alexander’s thoughts! Finally, someone acknowledging that Cesare and Michelotto had a past together! But as it went on, everyone seemed to flatten out into types or roles. Cesare isn’t Juan’s murderer here, but by the end, he’s become the “monster” everyone always said he was, even though the author claims not to be caught up in the rumors. Lucrezia is too much the pure innocent victim here. She becomes best friends with every other woman her age, because “female friendship is empowering”, only to end up crying at night over the sins of said married women sleeping with the priests in Lucrezia’s family. The narration tells us she’s the most politically astute of them, but she cries when her father asks her to lie. Michelotto is also cardboard here, as he is in every other piece of fiction but Soryo’s. Furthermore, this book is full of the kind of flowery language a lot of popular authors use to cover up a lack of substance, and I hated realizing that that was what was happening here.

This was published in 2012, and Soryo’s series ran from ‘05-‘21. I’d like to think they read each other and were inspired by each other. The scene near the end when Lucrezia sees the Pieta reminded me of something Soryo would depict, though I can see why Dunant chose to give a scene like that to Lucrezia instead of her version of Cesare. Also, the first scene of this book also happens in the last book of Soryo’s series, and I’ve never heard anything about it happening that way in real life, so I’m wondering if Soryo was inspired by Dunant in that.

There were also some interesting perspectives about the motivations of some of the people involved, which cast a new light on those interactions for me.