A Coin in Nine Hands by Marguerite Yourcenar

Well before Giulio, men had appropriated the labor of bees to offer the results to the gods; century after century, they had surrounded their holy relics with an honor guard of tiny flames, as they projected on their gods their own instinctive fear of the dark. Giulio's ancestors had needed rest, health, money, love: these unknown people had offered candles to the Virgin Mary in the same way that their ancestors, buried even deeper in the accumulations of time, had offered honey cakes to Venus' hot mouth. These flickerings had been consumed infinitely faster than brief human lives: some wishes had been denied; others, on the contrary, granted: the unfortunate thing is that, because wishes sometimes come true, the agony of hoping is perpetuated. Then, without asking for it, these people had obtained the only salvation that's certain, the dark gift that obliterates all others.

A single ten-lira coin, on a single day, in Italy in 1933, passes through the hands of nine people: A lovesick divorcee pays a prostitute; the prostitute, recently diagnosed with cancer, gives it to a pharmacist; the aged and weary pharmacist to the candle-seller at the church; the candle-seller uses it to buy hot coals from a woman planning to assassinate Mussolini; the would-be assassin gives it to her fascist ex-husband; her ex-husband buys flowers from an old street vendor; the vendor gives it to a visiting painter she believes to be a beggar; the painter gives it to a radical Russian caught up in the assassination plot; he chucks it into a fountain where it's found, at last, by a drunk.

The coin, which you might expect to have some symbolic quality it never really possesses, is more or less a gimmick that allows Yourcenar to sketch these many characters, their private desires and woes. More ties the characters together, in fact, than the coin itself, which provides a structural pattern rather than a thematic one: when the doctor Alessandro Sarte engages in a tryst with a woman in a dark theater, he cannot know that this is Angiola, the former wife of the divorcee and the sister of the candle-seller Rosalia. (He doesn't even know that Angiola is the same woman appearing on the screen of the movie, thinking only with contempt that she's a woman trying, with desperate makeup, to look like Angiola the actress.) The nine possessors of the coin are intimately connected with each other, but again and again they fail to recognize that connection. Connection, like the passing of the coin, is ephemeral; isolation is eternal.

Among other things, A Coin in Nine Hands is an effective snapshot of life in fascist Italy. The center of the novel--literally and metaphorically--is Marcella, the woman who has vowed to shoot Mussolini. The novel sketches both radicals and reactionaries, and both are haunted by the absence of a reformer named Carlo Stevo who is said to be near death on the prison island of Lipari. Marcella, a kind of lover-admirer of Stevo, knows that her attempt on Mussolini's life will mean the end of her own no matter what happens; there's something poignant in the way that the absent Stevo seems to loom larger in everyone's lives than the real people to and from whom the coin passes. I thought the most compelling sketch, though, was that of Mother Dida, the ordinary flower-vendor, who illustrates the way fascism is perpetuated. Politics pass only glancingly through the thoughts of Dida, who mulls over her failed marriages and estranged children, but who has convictions, both vague and strong, about Mussolini's reclamation of national strength.

The ten-cent lira is used to buy lots of things: sex, candles, flowers, coals, booze. At its end the novel feels curiously meager, as if nothing has really been purchased or obtained for all the coin's movement. Surely this is by design; a book of sketches like these is, at the end, a book of sketches, and though the lives of these nine figures overlap tightly the many lines between them create an emptiness, a loneliness, in them like the hole in the middle of a cat's cradle.