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Italy 1899: Fiery-tempered, seductive, medium Alessandra Poverelli levitates a table at a Spiritualist séance in Naples. A reporter photographs the miracle, and wealthy, skeptical, Jewish psychiatrist Camillo Lombardi arrives in Naples to investigate. When she materializes the ghost of his dead mother, he risks his reputation and fortune to finance a tour of the Continent, challenging the scientific and academic elite of Europe to test Alessandra’s mysterious powers. She will help him rewrite Science. His fee will help her escape her sadistic husband Pigotti and start a new life in Rome. Newspapers across Europe trumpet her Cinderella story and baffling successes, and the public demands to know – does the “Queen of Spirits” really have supernatural powers? Nigel Huxley is convinced she’s simply another vulgar, Italian trickster. The icy, aristocratic detective for England’s Society for the Investigation of Mediums launches a plot to trap and expose her. Meanwhile, the Vatican is quietly digging up her childhood secrets, desperate to discredit her supernatural powers; her abusive husband Pigotti is coming to kill her; and the tarot cards predict catastrophe. Inspired by the true-life story of controversial Italian medium Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918), The Witch of Napoli masterfully resurrects the bitter,19th-century battle between Science and religion over the possibility of an afterlife, while earning praise from Kirkus Reviews as an "enchanting and graceful narrative that absorbs readers from the first page." In March 2015, The Witch of Napoli" became an Amazon Top 100 paid bestseller. It is also a 2015 BRAG Medallion Award winner in Historical Fiction. Michael Schmicker is an investigative journalist and co-author of The Gift: ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People (St. Martin’s Press). He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.
- Sales Rank: #26259 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-01-02
- Released on: 2015-01-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Kirkus Reviews
This debut historical fantasy chronicles the life and times of a famous psychic medium during the late Victorian era. It’s 1918 in Italy, and the incomparable psychic Alessandra Poverelli has died. Tomaso Labella, editor of the newspaper Messaggero, is one of the people who knew her best. He fondly remembers meeting her in 1899, when he was a young photographer and she was an up-and-coming medium. She did more than talk to the dead, however—she could also levitate tables (with a poorly understood telekinesis), which brought her attention from scientific circles. She and Tomaso eventually toured Europe alongside the evolutionist and spiritualism skeptic Camillo Lombardi. This helped Alessandra escape her abusive husband, Pigotti, to whom she never planned to return. Yet, as her reputation soared, she became the target of those who aggressively tried to discredit her. Soon the pace of touring and nightly seances started to ruin Alessandra’s health—and she could only perform when in high spirits, surrounded by positive onlookers. When the church learned of her abilities, they endeavored to expose a tragic secret from her past. Little did her enemies know that the psychic could also channel a demonic presence that didn’t suffer fools lightly. Author Schmicker (The Listener, 2010) delivers an enchanting, graceful narrative that will absorb readers from the first page. Historical elements help ground the story and highlight psychic events when they do happen; we learn, for example, that there “were a lot of dead for [Alessandra] to talk to. Cholera swept through Naples all the time, and every family had lost a child...and hoped to make contact one last time.” The novel is bittersweet as the teen Tomaso pines for a love twice his age. He tells us she “was the first woman in my life.” Also impressive is how Schmicker captures the tone of the era: “The English rarely bother to learn any other language...why should they, they run the world.” In a tale this robust, readers shouldn’t take offense at the few slurs used in context. A fully transporting debut that should whet appetites for a follow-up. (Featured Review)
Review
"...science and the supernatural collide in a burst of passion you won't soon forget."--Huffington Post Books (Featured Review)
"Lyrical,authentic...Highly recommended."--Bookmuse UK (Recommended Read Award)
"...an extraordinary evocation of the Italian spirit." -- Discover New Historical Fiction
Meticulously researched...a riveting tale of19thcentury Europe and its obsession with the occult." --Literary Fiction Book Review
"One of a kind...a deeply moving novel you can't put down." -- San Diego Book Review
"Utterly absorbing...Very highly recommended."-- Historical Novel Society
"...cinematic writing...all the ingredients for a great mini-TVseries" -- Screenwriter/novelist JamesDalessandro (1906, Citizen Jane, TheDamnedest, Finest Ruins)
2015 BRAG Medallion Award for Historical Fiction
2015 Chanticleer Award (Supernatural Fiction)
2015 USA Best Books Award (Fiction)
About the Author
Michael Schmicker is an investigative journalist and nationally-known writer on scientific anomalies and the paranormal. He is the co-author of The Gift, ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People (St. Martin's Press (USA); Rider/Random House (UK). His first book, Best Evidence, has emerged as a classic in the field of scientific anomalies reporting since its first publication in 2000. His writings also appear in three anthologies, including "The Universe Wants to Play" (2006); "First of the Year 2009" (2009) edited by former Village Voice writer Benj DeMott; and "Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth" (2011). Victorian romance meets the Exorcist in his supernatural debut novel, The Witch of Napoli(2015), set in Italy and England in 1899. Michael began his writing career as a crime reporter for a suburban Dow-Jones newspaper in Connecticut, and worked as a freelance reporter in Southeast Asia for three years. He has also worked as a stringer for Forbes magazine, and Op-Ed contributor to The Wall Street Journal Asia. Michael has been a featured guest on national broadcast radio talk shows, including twice on Coast to Coast AM (560 stations in North America, with 3 million weekly listeners). He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Most helpful customer reviews
39 of 42 people found the following review helpful.
Adding gleam and glitter to a true story
By Michael E. Tymn
As Michael Schmicker, the author of this book, states, it is a work of fiction. However, its inspiration was the true-life story of Eusapia Palladino (1854 - 1918), an illiterate Italian peasant who awed many people with mediumistic phenomena, including levitations, materialized hands and arms, occasionally a full form materialization, mysterious lights, the playing of musical instruments by invisible hands, and apports (objects materialized in the room), as well as communicating raps and voices.
According to a number of Internet references, Palladino (also spelled "Paladino") was nothing more than a charlatan, a fake, an impostor - someone pretending to have mediumistic abilities by using sleight of hand (and foot) trickery. But most of the modern references are written by debunkers and other "know-nothings" whose minds are made up in opposition to any psychic phenomena. They focus on the negative reports only while ignoring the positive reports and failing to consider explanations that have eluded mainstream science.
As reported in the November 1909 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, a series of 40 sittings were conducted by Dr. Julian Ochorowicz, a psychologist, in Warsaw, Poland, during 1893-1894. In all, 23 experimenters participated. In the end, 10, including Ochorowicz, were convinced of the supernormal character of the phenomena, while seven were uncertain but accepted that they could not have been due to ordinary mechanical agency. Thus, 17 of the 23 did not believe what they had witnessed was trickery. Two were inclined, with certain reservations, to deny the supernormal character of the manifestations, and three concluded it had to be fraud of some kind, even though they couldn't prove it. One refused to express any opinion. And so it was with nearly every study of Palladino - some convinced she was a genuine medium, some convinced she was a fraud, and some not knowing what to believe.
Schmicker, the author of Best Evidence and co-author of The Gift, has studied the many books and research reports on Eusapia (most researchers referred to her by her first name) and has concluded that she was a genuine medium who probably, when her powers failed her, as they often did, resorted to some trickery so as not to disappoint people in attendance. Since the scientific research reports about Eusapia make for some pretty dry and monotonous reading, not telling much about her personal life, Schmicker has tried to fill in the gaps by adding some speculative glamour and glitter. He combines fact with fiction but holds fairly tightly to the investigative and phenomenal aspects of Eusapia's story.
"I write with full consciousness of being in the right," offered Professor Enrico Morselli, an Italian neurologist and director of the Clinic of Nervous and Mental Disease at the University of Genoa, "that the phenomena of physical mediumship attributed to Eusapia are in the great majority of cases real, authentic, genuine; that in the now innumerable series of her `spiritistic' manifestations there may be an admixture of some spurious phenomena, sometimes also naive and puerile attempts at deception on her part, and illusions or errors of appreciation on the part of the sitters; but on the whole the phenomena produced by Eusapia have for a calm scientist, an impartial observer, a competent student of psychology, an objective existence and positive consistency equal to those attained by categories of facts judged by ordinary reasoning, and verified and accepted in accordance with the rules of the experimental method."
Dr. Charles Richet, a professor of medicine and physiology at the University of Paris and the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, agreed. "Even if there were no other medium than Eusapia in the world, her manifestations would suffice to establish scientifically the reality of telekinesis and ectoplasmic forms," he wrote, noting that he observed her on some 200 occasions.
The debunkers claimed that Morselli, Richet, and the many other scientific men who attested to the reality of Eusapia's phenomena were simply duped by a clever magician. But two researchers schooled in both science and magic, Hereward Carrington and W.W. Baggally, along with Everard Fielding, closely studied Eusapia in Naples during 1908, attending 11 séances with her. "I have to record my absolute conviction of the reality of at least some of the phenomena," Carrington concluded, "and the conviction amounting in my own mind to complete certainty, that the results witnessed by us were not due to fraud or trickery on the part of Eusapia." Baggally agreed, pointing out that they observed 470 phenomena during the 11 sittings and that it was impossible for Eusapia to have practiced trickery constantly during the many hours they observed her." Fielding supported the conclusions of his fellow researchers.
Dr. Cesare Lombroso (called "Camillo Lombardi" by Schmicker), a pioneer in abnormal psychology and criminology, initially scoffed at the whole idea that there was anything to mediumship. Like the vast majority of naturalists, he believed that Eusapia, or Alessandra, as Schmicker names her, was suffering from something called female hysteria and that the various phenomena were produced by trickery. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have a choice," Schmicker quotes Lombardi, "we can remain in the darkness of primitive superstition, or we can embrace the light of Science. I choose Science." The supposedly "intelligent" world applauded Lombardi's words.
But after Lombroso began studying Eusapia, his attitude also changed. On two occasions he observed her being levitated above the table. "[Eusapia], who was seated near one end of the table, was lifted up in her chair bodily, amid groans and lamentations on her part, and placed (still seated) on the table, then returned to the same position as before," he documented. In one of those levitations, Lombroso was holding one of her hands, as Professor Richet held the other. While in trance, Eusapia complained of (invisible) hands grasping her under the arms. Then, her voice changed, apparently to that of John King, her spirit control, and said, "Now I lift my medium up on the table." Lombroso and Richet continued to hold her hands as Eusapia and the chair rose to the top of the table without hitting anything." They then observed her deposited back on the floor with the same security and precision.
Some of the séances observed by Lombroso were given during daylight conditions, but because of the sensitivity of ectoplasm to light, the best phenomena were produced under dark conditions with a red lantern permitting the sitters to observe.
By 1903, Lombroso had observed Eusapia many more times, but at a sitting with her in Genoa in 1903, he experienced something new. Before Eusapia entered the trance state, Lombroso asked her for some special manifestation that day and he got it as his deceased mother appeared, spoke to him, and kissed him. Lombroso wrote that his mother reappeared at least 20 times in subsequent sittings, although less distinct than on that first occasion. "Her deepest grief is when she is accused of trickery during the séances - accused unjustly, too, sometimes, it must be confessed," Lombroso wrote of Eusapia, "because we are now sure that phantasmal limbs are superimposed (or added to) her own and act as their substitutes, while all the time they were believed to be her own limbs detected in the act of cozening for their owner's behoof."
Richet described Eusapia as a simple-minded woman, yet intelligent. At his private retreat on Ribaud Island in the Mediterranean, Richet, along with Sir Oliver Lodge, a distinguished physicist and pioneer in electricity, Frederic Myers, an esteemed pioneering psychical researcher, and Dr. Ochorowicz, conducted experiments with Eusapia during 1894 and observed various phenomena.
One of the tests they put her to involved a spring dynamometer, which, when squeezed, measured hand grip strength. It was Richet's idea that all the energy used at a sitting had to come from the medium or some of the sitters. Thus, he recorded the grip strength of Eusapia and each sitter before and after the two-hour sitting. In the before reading, Lodge, who stood 6-4 with a muscular build, scored the highest, followed by Richet, Myers, and Ochorowicz, with Eusapia's being much weaker than the four men. But after the sitting, Eusapia was giving a feeble clutch when she suddenly shouted, "Oh, John, you're hurting me!" and the men observed the needle go far beyond what any of them could exert. "She wrung her fingers afterwards, and said John (King) had put his great hand around hers, and squeezed the machine up to an abnormal figure," Lodge recorded the experience, noting that "John King" occasionally showed his otherwise invisible hand, "a big, five-fingered, ill-formed thing it looked in the dusk."
Though Eusapia was searched before she came into the room and was not allowed in the room beforehand, there were times when the three men thought they saw her cheating by using her hands or feet. "She wanted us to understand that it was not conscious deception, but that [John King] took whatever means available, and if he found an easy way of doing things, thus would it be done," Lodge explained. In other words, Eusapia's consciousness had vacated her body and the invisible John King was controlling her arms and legs to accomplish certain tasks, thus making it appear that Eusapia was doing them consciously. At other times, a third arm - one made of ectoplasm, that mysterious substance exuded by some mediums - appeared and seemed to be extending from Eusapia's body as if it were her own arm.
"Disbelievers!" Schmicker has Eusapia/Alessandra yelling at the observers at Ribaud Island, as a chilling hiss filled the room. "You demand signs and wonders, even as the Devil prepares your place in Hell."
Lodge added that Eusapia resented the charges of fraud and that he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, so far as the morals of deception were concerned, referring to her as a kindly soul with many of the instincts of a peasant. He recalled that on more than one occasion, she took a boat to a mainland village and came back without her coat. When asked what happened to it, she explained that she gave it to a beggar who needed it more than she did.
While Schmicker adds glamour, gleam, and glitter to an already colorful, sometimes gaudy, tale - one that likely will exceed the boggle threshold of those mired in the debunking camp - he creatively captures the crux of the story as documented by various researchers and historians, offering the reader not totally familiar with story of Eusapia Palladino much to ponder on.
51 of 57 people found the following review helpful.
Expected to be Be-Witched; Instead, was Be-Bored
By Jim Schmidt
2.49 stars - I appreciate that many folks have enjoyed this book - I'm glad for them and glad for the author. I'm just not one of those people. I was pre-disposed to like this book, as I have an interest in the Spiritualist movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The main problem with this book is that there is no narrative or character arc - it's little more than an episodic, fictionalized biography of an interesting real subject, Eusapia Palladino. There's lots of globetrotting, descriptions of locales and personalities, descriptions of seances, etc., often drawn from first hand accounts - it makes for interesting biography, but *not* an interesting novel, and probably points to the author's previous nonfiction experience and first trransition to fiction. I give the author high marks for choosing a novel protagonist and locale, for some good descriptions of the seances, especially the "manifestations" of Savonarola, and for descriptions of precautions taken by the investigators to avoid trickery. The novel is made less enjoyable by an unlikeable narrator, by poor pacing (one- and two-page chapters, apparently meant to accelerate the pace/tension, only point to the inability to sustain the narrative), and the inclusion of tired anti-Catholic bigotry as plot devices. As alternative reading in a similar vein, I highly recommend Joseph Gangemi's "Inamorata" (5 stars) and Katherine Howe's "House of Velvet and Glass" (3 stars).
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful.
One of the Most Mesmerizing Novels I've Ever Read!
By Stephanie Ward
'The Witch of Napoli' is a mesmerizing historical fantasy that follows the life of Alessandra Poverelli after she supposedly raises a table during a Seance in Italy. When the story hits the newspapers, people from around the world are skeptical of her "powers" - and some even come to Europe to investigate for themselves. One such person is the wealthy yet skeptical psychiatrist Camillo Lombardi, who looks into Alessandra's talents for himself. He can no longer deny her abilities after she raises the ghost of his dead mother right before his eyes. Risking everything - including his money and reputation - Lombardi takes Alessandra on a tour of the Continent so all the skeptics - scientists and academics mostly - can see firsthand what she can do. Lombardi hopes to rewrite science completely with his newfound prize and the money from the tour allows Alessandra to escape her abusive husband. Not everyone is convinced of Alessandra's gifts - the Vatican is secretly digging up her past and trying to discredit her, while an aloof detective plans a trap that will expose her as the fraud she really is. People across the globe are demanding the truth about Alessandra - does she truly have supernatural powers or is she just another fraud?
I'm a huge fan of any type of book that deals with witches and witchcraft - fiction or nonfiction. When I heard of this book and read the description - I was immediately intrigued by the mysterious Alessandra and her story, and I knew I had to read it. I don't normally read a lot of historical fiction, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I started the book. Suffice it to say that it was everything I could have hoped for and then some. It went above and beyond any expectation I may have had. This is one of those situations where you read a book and love it so much and for so many different reasons, but it's almost impossible to express why you feel this way; let alone attempt to write a review. I know I can never do it the justice it deserves, but I'll try my best. I can honestly say that this book was enchanting and had me under its spell from the first lines. The story was incredibly fascinating and complex - learning about Alessandra, her "powers" and her life in general with tangent plot lines of critics who try to discredit her or trap her into showing that she's a fraud, and even her relationship with the abusive Pigotti. All of these smaller story lines intertwined to form a beautifully deep novel with several levels of narrative and concepts.
Everything in the book - from the characters to the setting and just the regular narrative within the pages - was exceptionally well done. I wholeheartedly believe that this was because of the writing style of the author. The story was told from a first person point of view - not one that you would expect, like Alessandra or her manager, but from the man who first photographed her spiritual powers when he was a teen. From his relationship with Alessandra and all the people in her life and career, we are transported into the heart of the story alongside him. Because of the point of view used, the reader can truly understand the inner workings of the narrator - his thoughts, fears, dreams, memories, etc. - and by the end of the book we feel as if we were there as well and have personally experienced it ourselves. I love when authors use this point of view because it allows the reader to really empathize and identify with the narrator on a much deeper scale than they would normally be able to. Along with the conversational tone of the writing and the benefit of being inside the mind of someone who experienced everything discussed in the story, I found that the author used tons of intricately detailed descriptions and vivid imagery to submerge the reader even further into the world he created. It's because of all of these aspects that I was mesmerized by the narrative from the first few words all the way to the very end. There's no use going into more detail about the story and what happens or the characters - I feel that these are pretty self explanatory from the description of the book alone, and what really matters with this novel is the writing. I honestly can't praise the author enough for the beautiful way the book was written or the intoxicating narrative he created for us to disappear into. All I can say is that I can't recommend this book highly enough! It has a bit of something for everyone - action, adventure, historical fiction, fantasy, supernatural/paranormal, realistic fiction, romance; I could go on and on. This novel contains some of the best writing I've ever encountered, and combined with the story and other aspects of the book - it's one that I'll never forget and will definitely be re-reading in the future. Read this book - NOW. You won't regret it.
Disclosure: I received a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.
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