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Product Description
The Pope's Rhinoceros is a vivid, antic, and picaresque novel spun around one of history's most bizarre chapters: the sixteenth-century attempt to procure a rhinoceros as a bribe for Pope Leo X. In February 1516, a Portuguese ship sank off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Senora de Ajuda had sailed fourteen thousand miles from the Indian kingdom of Gujarat. Her mission: to bribe the "pleasure-loving Pope" into favoring expansionist Portugal over her rival Spain with the most exotic and least likely of gifts -- a living rhinoceros. Moving from the herring colonies of the Baltic Sea to the West African rain forest, with a cast of characters including an order of reclusive monks and Rome's corrupt cardinals, courtesans, ambassadors, and nobles, The Pope's Rhinoceros is at once a fantastic adventure tale and a portrait of an age rushing headlong to its crisis.
Amazon.com Review
In the tradition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Umberto Eco, Lawrence Norfolk has created a dizzyingly dense and impressively erudite fantasy of a novel, a vast edifice based around a single, actual historical event: the sinking off the coast of Italy of a Portugese ship bound on a bizarre mission, to deliver an African rhino to Pope Leo X. Norfolk takes his readers on a world tour of the 16th century, from the flophouses of Rome to the rain forest of West Africa, and along the way he piles historical esoterica upon philosophical rumination upon myriad subplots and minor characters. The chains of event and coincidence and the encyclopedic references will exhaust some readers long before the mad quest for the rhino meets its watery end, but Norfolk's baroque talent remains inexhaustible.
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