The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 November 2008
by Marguerite Yourcenar
On the surface, this is the story of a 10-lire coin, as it passes from hand to hand over the course of a day in Rome in 1933. But, that, of course, is merely the thread on which the rest of the book rests. This is an intricate story of lives intertwined on one day fateful for some, normally tragic and lonely for others. The coin begins in the pocket of a lonely old man, visiting a prostitute in Rome, a woman who gives him comfort in his long bitter memories of his lost young love. She takes the coin to a perfume shop after visiting a famous doctor who tells her nothing she doesn't already know about the lump growing in her breast. The shop owner has the coin with him when he visits a nearby church on his way home that night. There, several connecting characters briefly cross paths. The coin ends up in the hand of a candle-seller, a bitter old woman who sees nothing in her own future. And so on. The key tale in the book is that of an assassin, an erstwhile lover of a dissident sent to prison by the Dictator, a Mr. Mussolini still on his rise. (In fact, the book was first published as Denier du rêve before World War 2, and this is an updated version brought out 25 years later.) Marcella Sarte, wife of the famous physician, is also an anarchist, or some such political stripe, and plans a suicidal attack on the Dictator. Here is the dramatic core of the book, but also its most long-winded and sluggish chapter. The political and existential dialogue is a bit stilted, and doesn't quite hold up the standard of the otherwise brilliant prose that Yourcenar imparts with such feeling and depth. It is the surrounding chapters, with the lesser characters, all of whom are linked in some way beyond the passage of the titular coin, that make the book a dramatic story of loss and despair, sadness and even hope.
(A 1993 movie, Twenty Bucks updated the premise, following a twenty-dollar bill through its life, though in that case the money itself was more integral to the plot.)