In this polished and thoughtful book, John Berendt serves as our guide to the funhouse that is Venice. It's a mysterious city inhabited by the eccentric and the legendary, including Ezra Pound and his longtime mistress, Olga Rudge, art collector Peggy Guggenheim and painter Ludovico De Luigi, known for pulling such attention-grabbing stunts as inviting porn star and member of Italy's parliament Ilona Staller to ride shirtless atop his sculpture of a horse in St. Mark's Square. The fun of reading this book lies in the melodramatic monologues and gestures of the Venetians and the Americans who love this city, all the while keeping in mind what one elderly count says to Berendt in the prologue: "Everyone in Venice is acting. Everyone plays a role, and the role changes." The count attributes this behavior to "the Venice effect," a spell cast by the city that blurs the boundary between reality and fantasy. Venice is portrayed here as an architecturally ornate stage for dramas both large and small, and Berendt has a front-row seat. He alone seems untouched by the Venice effect, simply because his role as journalistic observer requires a great deal of imperturbability, but that is of course a pose adopted by all great travel writers.

Unlike Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil, Berendt's bestselling exploration of Savannah, Georgia, Angels focuses not on a compelling murder story but a 1996 fire that destroyed Teatro La Fenice -- an opera house dating back to the 18th century that long served as a cultural and social center for the city. While the story of this fire and the subsequent investigation and rebuilding occupies a good portion of Angels, Berendt devotes entire chapters to other meanderings. There's the time he set out for the island of Giudecca in the hopes of entering a famous walled garden; he never makes it in, a woman turns him away, but on the way there, Berendt meets Capitano Mario, who slips in and out of his many uniforms as he assumes the roles of soldier, fireman, policeman and more. It's all part of a day's work for the capitano and is proof of his immersion in the Venice effect.

In one of the book's most affecting chapters, Berendt investigates how Ezra Pound's papers ended up not with his family in Europe but at Yale University. He presents research as well as conversations between himself and those connected with the controversy, including Mary de Rachewiltz, the daughter of Pound and Rudge. He wisely lets his subjects speak for themselves; they imply that Rudge had been taken advantage of by a friend and her family poorly compensated for Pound's papers. A strong parallel is made between this tale and Henry James' The Aspern Papers, which also deals with the personal tragedy surrounding the letters of a Byronic American poet who had once lived in Venice. Here and elsewhere, art and life echo each other and will continue to do so.

Berendt's tone here is more subdued than in Midnight, more reportorial. Perhaps he sought to make his journalistic technique more transparent, especially since the reading public has learned how much he relied on fictional techniques in that first book; for instance, it contained composite characters and placed the author in the thick of things, even though many of the events happened before Berendt appeared on the scene. His more straightforward approach in this second book may indicate an acknowledgement that the majority of his readers -- and some of his critics, for that matter -- might dislike the intermingling of fiction and nonfiction, the way some people get turned off by unisex bathrooms or mixed marriages. Truth be told, the blurring of genres has its place; after all, the best technique for telling a story may be an unconventional one; sometimes it can only be released through the blurring of boundaries.

by Karen Trimbath
Rambles.NET
4 March 2006