Let's start with the positives, shall we?

I'm not one to complain about excessive descriptions. In fact, I find that I actually enjoy it. The way that Ann Radcliffe describes architecture, landscapes, and natural sceneries can be lavish and overindulgent, but to me it was vivid, even poetic. So that's one.

There are multiple scenes, mostly the dialogue-heavy ones, which I quite enjoyed, like Vivaldi's confrontation with his father, with Schedoni, and the one where he expressed concern for Ellena's mourning at a convent.

The antagonist was formidable; an unspeakably evil man. There was the subtle, yet effective, portrayal of the church's power and corruption, and the characters of Ellena and Olivia as conduits of the very real fears and anxieties of 18th century women in a heavily patriarchal period of time, that is to say, of confinement and restrictions.

Now, to the negatives. Honestly, it was everything else. This book is just tedious, and even that is too generous of a word. The pacing is so, so slow. I was reading pages upon pages where virtually nothing happens. The characters fell flat. And my biggest gripe of all.. was how predictable it all was.

This book's predictability was at a maximum, and that is where I felt very, very sad. I wanted to like this book, truly. But predictability dashes the core tenets of the Gothic upon the rocks, because uncertainty is the machination that the Gothic novel operates on. Its horror or terror relies for the most part on the fact that both the characters and the readers are pervaded with a heightened sense that something unfortunate will happen, yet not being able to pinpoint exactly what. It's the dreadful and inexplicable feeling of being watched, followed, observed, haunted.

Every single piece of Gothic literature that I have read succeeded in making me feel this way, in immersing me in an atmosphere of pure suspense, except for The Italian. This is my most disappointing read of the year (so far).