A Review of I, MICHELANGELO, my latest novel
This appeared on the Novels Alive website.
By Sandy Saucier
Author Tom Maremaa has journeyed to create I, Michelangelo. As a young boy, he visited Florence, Italy, and was drawn to the city created by artists and artisans. It never left him. Maremaa read biographies of Michelangelo and started to make connections between that man’s struggles to create art and to navigate a relationship with his own father and the papal father, Pope Julius II and how those themes of the want of connection can ring true now.
I am fascinated by authors who speak to the experience of the novel telling itself in their minds and hearts. Maremaa states his novel propelled itself. He had never written a book from so many points of view, but this is how it was “spoken” to him. So, I, Michelangelo, is told from multiple viewpoints and intertwines the life of Michelangelo as he paints the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo, a modern man who struggles to find a way to care for his son after the tragic loss of his wife.
This novel is very much a crime-show-told-story. Each chapter is told by a character in their own voice. The author does such a good job keeping the vocabulary simple, as though these are truly words spoken and not contrived and written. I could hear the voices in my head as I read, each distinctively different.
Most of the novel follows Michelangelo D’Antonio as he explains how he came to a life of crime after beginning as a middle school opera and art teacher. He is planning a bonding trip with his 16-year-old son, but an opportunity comes for him to facilitate a reckoning that may be too much and may threaten those he loves. However, the parameters within the crime world are shifty. In and out of this narrative are scenes of related struggles as Pope Julius makes demands of the artist Michelangelo in the 1500s during two different political climates.
Combining both Michelangelo’s doesn’t always seem clear, but in reading the author’s notes, the comparatives made sense.
As the end of the novel approaches, maybe the modern Michelangelo will finally rebuild his life and find justice, love, and parental respect. But then . . . he didn’t see it coming—no one did!
I, Michelangelo reads easily with multiple first-person narratives of a crime web and very creatively includes connections to the painting of the Sistine Chapel!