A man of character - Paola Capriolo

At its most straightforward, A Man of Character is the story of Erasmo Stiler, an engineer who inherits a derelict villa and destroys himself attempting to transform its garden into 'a sort of Versailles' in an attempt to tame chaos. It is a book about
the relationship between art and nature,
the importance of living one's life as a moral project and the dangers of demanding of others that their behaviour be totally rational. It confirms Capriolo's place in the great tradition of European novelists for whom a human life is also a work of art.