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Literature

Fulvio Tomizza, Heavenly Supper: Story of Maria Janis

Translated by Anne Jacobson Schutte.
University of Chicago Press (October 1991), hardcover, first edition, dust jacket, 175 p., 9-1/4 x 5-3/4 in.
ISBN: 0226807894

US-Preisempfehlung*: $32.50
Preis: DM 79,40
EUR 40,59

Synopsis
It is a winter morning in Venice, in 1622. Muted voices drift through a thin wall next door. Her curiosity aroused, a young woman peers through a crack in the door, only to witness a strange and disturbing sight: a woman and a priest secretly celebrating communion. Troubled by what she sees, she reports the incident at confession. Her revelation leads to the arrest, jailing, and arraignment of the two for heresy before the Venetian Holy Office of the Inquisition.

So begins Fulvio Tomizza's absorbing account of the true story of Maria Janis, a devout peasant woman from the mountains north of Bergamo. Too poor to enter a convent, Maria had set out to serve God by relinquishing the little she had, through renunciation of all food but the bread and wine of communion. Encouraged by the restless village priest Pietro Morali, Maria claimed to have existed in this sanctified state for five years. During this time, she, Morali, and the weaver Pietro Palazzi travel from a little village in the Alps to Rome and then to Venice, where their alleged sacrilege is discovered and they are brought to trial. Both revered as a saint and reviled as a fraud, Maria with her "privilege" inspires and threatens believers within the Church. Combining the historian's precision with the novelist's imagination, Tomizza painstakingly reconstructs her story, crafting a fascinating portrait of sublimated love, ambition, and jealousy.

"Heavenly Supper alternates a chronological account of the trial with analyses of each protagonist's life history. Along the way, Tomizza gives voice to the minds and hearts of his characters, allowing them to speak for themselves in their own words. The world he recreates resonates with the fervor of the Counter Reformation when faith and its consequences were rigidly controlled by the Church. As suspenseful as a detective novel, Tomizza's story goes beyond the trial to evoke a panoramic view of seventeenth-century Italian culture.

The first of Italian novelist/historian Tomizza's 22 works to be translated into English, this is the creepy tale of a 17th-century religious ascetic caught on the borderline between intense devotion and self-deception. In 1662 Venice, a peasant peers through a crack in a boardinghouse door to witness a priest and a woman performing Mass. Such private services are forbidden; the couple is denounced to the Inquisition. The woman, it transpires, is Maria Janis of Bergamo, who challenges her accusers with the extraordinary assertion that she has eaten nothing for the past five years but the bread and wine of daily communion. Her priest, Pietro Morali, backs her claim. Through months of interrogation, the authorities grind down woman and priest until they confess: Janis has indeed fasted more ''than the greatest of the desert saints" in a pathetic effort to become a living saint--but she has also swallowed salami, headcheese, and pasta when her suffering became too great. Tomizza offers scant sympathy for his protagonist, and none of the "suspense and coup de th‚ƒtre"' he promises. Nor does he seize the opportunity to probe with any depth issues of sanctity, authority, or eating-as-sacrament. He concludes that his interest in Janis is "due not to her holiness but rather to her humanity"'--but this quality resides in everyone: small justification for a turgid read. Unnourishing.

Whether the seventeenth-century Maria Janis was a saint or a fraud is the question posed by this most readable tale. She and her parish priest contended that she lived for five years on nothing but the eucharistic host. The Inquisition did not think so, and Fulvio Tomizza does not say what he thinks. Heavenly Supper is an engaging and subtle introduction to a period of Catholic piety and Western culture.

Updated: 19 February 1999

Sources:

http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0226807894&id=A_ETB_Y48RAC&dq=Istria

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