conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled After Hannibal about Umbria, Hannibal, Fabio with the genre: Literature & Fiction, United States.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author, who lives in Umbria, has chosen to set his latest novel, After Hannibal , among the wandering lanes and ancient fields he knows well. His cast of characters is a diverse bunch that includes a homosexual couple named Fabio and Arturo; a mentally unstable German named Ritter; the Greens, an American couple; the morose Italian historian Monti; and the Chapmans, a dull British couple at war with a local family, the Checchettis, over maintenance of a wall that fronts the country lane they both share. the author uses geographical propinquity to link them all together and then throws in another common bond as well: the crafty lawyer Mancini, whom almost all have cause to consult at one time or another during the course of the novel.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first four paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'After Hannibal
  They stood there for quite some time, admiring the small gushes of new leaf that were breaking out all along the length of the vines'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After Hannibal
  They stood there for quite some time, admiring the small gushes of new leaf that were breaking out all along the length of the vines. Miraculous to see the stems, bare and dead-seeming for so long, begin to produce these fountains of green, the pinkish rosettes of the buds opening from day to day and spreading outward from the heart in bursts of leaf, as if there were some inexhaustible source of life and renewal in the brown, fibrous trunks.
  The light was fading now and it grew cooler. A nightingale began to sing from somewhere not far away. They listened to the first tuning notes, the sudden loud release of song. Another bird joined in, then another. Any lingering anxiety the Greens might have felt was dissolved in that lyrical nightfall. As they turned to go back indoors they felt quite certain that they had done the right thing to come here and buy this house.
  The following day the Chapmans had two visits, about an hour apart. The first was from Bruno, the Checchetti son-in-law, who had been dispatched with an ultimatum. His round face fixed in its faint, mindless, embarrassed-seeming smile, he delivered his message in the manner of one repeating a lesson—Cecilia felt sure he had been schooled in it. His wife had learned, he said, through her important contacts in the town hall, that the minimum legal width of a neighborhood road was two meters. At present, throughout the kilometer or so of its length, it was two meters and a half wide. It was slightly less than this below the Checchetti wall because of the rubble along the edge. But not much less, Bruno said. The Chapmans had a week in which to reconsider their position. If at the end of that time they had not paid over in cash, without any interference from a lawyer, the million lire they had promised toward the building of the new wall, they, the Checchetti, would put stakes in the road outside their house at an exact distance of two meters. This would still allow the passage of a car; but vans and lorries would not be able to get through.
  There was not much point, both the Chapmans saw, in expostulating with Bruno. He was merely doing what he had been told to do. "We will not give in to blackmail," Harold Chapman said, and heard with habitual impatience his firm tones transmuted to the gentle, wavering ones of his wife, which seemed to thin out in the air and drift away. Cecilia was doing her best, he knew, but she did not sound like a woman who would not give in to blackmail.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As he stood there with the bottle in his hands it seemed to him that the water running in the stream below sounded suddenly louder. He was near it now, there was only the final close-growing barrier of bramble and blackthorn, then the leaning, smothered poplars that lay just above the stream. He could see nothing of the water yet, the level had fallen in this drier weather, the course of the stream was still invisible.
  He was in a green twilight here. Wild clematis had clambered up through the branches of the poplars to a height of thirty or forty feet and they mingled their darker leaves with the foliage of their host, shutting out the light. The trunks of the trees were ragged with ivy. Ritter saw great clumps of it, thick with dark berries, bending the upper branches with their weight. The new shoots of the parasite, higher up, showed a delicate tracery of leaf and a beautiful spiraling growth of the gently adhesive creepers; but the reality of the ivy, to Ritter's sense at least, lay in the ground roots, dense and hairy and hideously matted, like a thick pelt around the base of the tree. Cutting through this dealt a mortal blow to the whole: it withered there where it had clambered and triumphed, high up in the sunlight. But the ancient cables of the ivy were embedded, they could not relax their grip, could not be removed without death to the host. Strangle marks that would never be healed, they would stay there on the tree till the tree died...
  A lot depended, of course, on the character of this driver. He might choose the path of least resistance, as Mancini had shrewdly thought, preferring not to risk any brush with officialdom. On the other hand, he might be a quick-tempered man or by nature intransigent; he might kick the Checchetti stakes out of the ground and so ruin everything.
  Chapman watched with bated breath. The colloquy was not protracted. After perhaps two minutes the driver climbed back into his seat. Chapman saw the lorry reverse away up the slope and turn back toward the village.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Mancini sighed to himself, brushing small crumbs from his lapels. Judges were not always notable for taking the commonsense view of things. Justice in this case would best be served if Fabio kept the house and land and the income deriving from them and Arturo received a sum of money substantial enough to mark his contribution of work and service. By private agreement it would have to be, since Italian law did not recognize the rights of homosexuals in property settlements. The best outcome, if it could be done quickly. But Arturo would want more, his lawyer would encourage him to press the false bill of sale. If the device of the promissory notes was not accepted, the case would drag on for years and in the end Arturo would get nothing, his lawyer would get it all. This was not justice either. He had behaved with outstanding wickedness, but moral turpitude does not cancel property rights—another distinction important to preserve...
  He had finished his tea now. He rang for the secretary to come and take the tray. She informed him that his next clients were already waiting and he asked her to show them in.
  The answer when it came did not surprise him. The present whereabouts of the vendor were unknown. He had decamped with their joint deposit, leaving them with a massive debt to the bank.
  He folded his large, pale hands into loose fists and rested his chin on them. For a short while silence reigned in the room. Then he looked up and lowered his hands again to the desk, causing glimmering reflections in the lustrous surface. "This is what you must do."