Poetry

Ova

Ova grows up in middle-class Britain, surrounded by governesses and nurses who let life alone lest it discomfort them, while her mother's vagaries drift through the household. Her childhood is anemic hours devoid of vitality, and the neighbors read her as palpable evidence of a criminal born. Her unformulated education—raw experience rather than national instigation—makes her the book's central lens on how a self gets made, and unmade, under the pressure of family and nation.

Giovanni Franchi

Giovanni Franchi haunts Paszkowski's and the piazzas of Florence, his articulations excellent, his wrists explaining things infectiously, his adolescence all there is of him. He is disciple to the philosopher Giovanni Bapini, mimicking the older man's look and manner while remaining merely pale where Bapini was cymophanous. Around him circle three women in identical ferned dresses, each chasing a different first—faithfulness, self-loyalty, or the philosopher's toes—and Franchi's awkward, patriotic posturing becomes the pivot of their divergent instincts.

Exodus

Crushed by the Occident and lashed by tongues in lieu of knouts, Exodus trades the Danube's indifference for the pound-sterling's alien asylum, where his coaly eye challenges the unrevealed universe and his business-English dazzles the sartorial world. He paints sunflowers on Sundays without knowing why, stands like a larch on incarcerate corners, and deplores the anomalous legs of Zion's sons with a subconscious superiority. His loneliness and his unformulated conception of life drive him toward the heart of England—and toward the boarding-house lady, the locket, and whatever he begets.

Esau Penfold

Esau Penfold is the boy for whom Patricia Penfold wrote The Infant Aesthete, displayed at Lady Bliss's costume ball where matrons put themselves on the order list and professors discourse on calculus over his head. In the Penfold residence on Ridover Square he moves among fifteenth-century andirons, Buddha's ruby eyes, and Florentine angels, a living advertisement for British culture's competitive cultivation of childhood. Set against Exodus's child propped on a cretonne chair under an oleograph, Esau embodies the gilded, curated infancy that Ova's world denies her.

Ada

Ada is the widowed mother who took a spouse of her own sphere and whose unfortunate having given birth to a criminal the neighbors read in Ova's every posture. Her vagaries—changed to her daughter's experience—shape Ova's hours into an irredeemable anemia, while her nurses and governesses, pinch-faced conservatives, respect life by refusing to tease its slumberous ferocity. She is the domestic weather Ova's consciousness uncurls against, the family reflection of national construction through which the book's early portrait of a self takes its contours.

Giovanni Bapini

A philosopher figure, possibly a satirical portrait of a real thinker.