“In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.” – Nietzsche

Last time in our discussion, we touched on the notion of how genre conventions can be manipulated by a skilled writer: our expectations, for example, of when the corpse will ‘surface’ in a mystery or detective novel (earlier rather than later) were “off-set” by the delay in _Through a Glass, Darkly_.

For our final installment in this summer’s Book Club, we read a third kind of genre: historical fiction, wherein the reader’s expectations are tempered by the accuracy or believability of the setting / time period in which the “fiction” occurs. While the characters may or may not be based on actual persons, we expect that the surrounding details of the setting will seamlessly transport us back in time, back in history. Interestingly enough, we often place similar demands on fiction: even stories that are not deliberately set in a historical period, require a certain aura of believability. If our hero suddenly acts “out of character,” we are disappointed in part because the illusion of the work – that it come to seem almost more real than reality – is painfully interrupted by our glimpse of the metaphorical Wizard Of Oz manipulating the levers and switches behind the emerald curtains. (There are of course exceptions who subvert the very premise of what is believable in the first place – as for when Kafka’s Gregor Samsa wakes up one day to ‘find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin.’) Instead of beginning with the reviews this time, I’ll give my take and then compare it to what the critics observed (next post.)

No wonder that the first question in the “Questions and Topics for Discussion” section focuses on this very question, for in some ways it is the litmus test for works in this genre. Are they “accurate” at the same time they are imaginative? Is there an opposition between history and art (beauty)? [On beauty, see 185-189; 208; 231 etc.]

The more I reflect back on the novel, skimming back through it for pithy quotes, the more the history in _In the Company of the Courtesan_almost overshadows the characters. While I very much enjoyed Bucino, Fiametta, and La Draga, my own imagination is almost more attracted to this moment in time, first 1527 and then (part 3) the mid 1530s. As Dunant outlines in the “Historical Note” that serves as preface, Rome falls a short ten years after Luther’s stubborn refusal to capitulate to the Catholic Church. This is not just the Renaissance (as such), it’s the entire emergence of the modern. With the New World fueling changes that were sweeping the Continent, this was the age of the “Wunderkammern,” the wonder cabinet that combined art & science in the same visual space. Dunant’s sense of the historical moment spans not just Venice ‘at the height of its powers,’ but also the encroaching presence of the Ottoman Empire (through the character of Abdullah Pashna; 90-92, 135, 250-256,) and the marginalized Jewish Ghetto.

As for the characters, meanwhile, they inhabit this carefully constructed history without somehow taking it for granted. On a general level, they reflect the zeitgeist of the age: if Europe is ‘re-born’ at this time, so too are they “born again” in Venice, rising from the ashes of Rome with a touch of good old Hollywood magic, a mouthful of precious gems and a plot device that will come in very handily a number of times, just as it seems there is no way out: the world’s first erotic book (23, 145, 152-157, 167, 310-11, 317).

Bucino’s keen observations on religion (8-9; 26-29; 149-150; 182-184; 255; 294-295, 328-329) benefit from a historian’s perspective, almost an outsider’s point of view (making him a dwarf is a good choice), or someone who’s able to conceive of themselves in the midst of their historical moment, a dot in time. Bucino, amazingly enough, can not only read, having been taught by his father (145), but grew up with a collection of his own books that enable him to place himself firmly in the major intellectual framework of the period. Told from his point of view in the present tense (the exception is the past tense for pp. 3-42; 44-54), Bucino is arguably the novel’s main character, although the self-reflection or ‘epiphany’ that he makes during Fiametta’s love affair with Foscari is hardly earth-shattering. Instead, it’s a rather quiet moment of realization: “For it is true,” he says to himself, “that I am duller than I was. (…) Did I come this far for that? (280). When at last he confesses to Fiametta that he’s in love with La Draga (322), it’s all the Courtesan can do to sigh, in melodramatic sympathy, “Oh, Bucino.” In the final scene, he and Fiametta welcome La Draga’s daughter (also named Fiametta) into the house, presumably to be raised by both of them (as some kind of super-whore?).

As much as I enjoyed the characters, I couldn’t quite escape the feeling that they were being used to illustrate aspects of history. On one occasion, I tripped on an apparent contradiction: Bucino tells us on page 265 that he does “not remember (his) mother (…) I have no image or memory of what she looked like,” and yet early in the novel he clearly recalls (albeit fuzzily) “a woman’s face smiling down at me, holding me, running her fingers over the top of my head as if it was a thing of wonder rather than a thing of shame” (52).

For Fiammetta too, mothers serve as authority figures that sit in judgment of one’s life (see 41, 57, 84-85, 87, 131, 238). Fiammetta’s trajectory, like Bucino’s, is similarly anti-climactic. Like Bucino, she falls for an impossible other, the “puppy” Foscari, and offers as an excuse: “For him, I am me. Just me. And yes, yes, he loves me for it.” (239) Watching them in his best voyeuristic moment, Bucino observes that

…this is not the crude excitement of the act. Rather it is its aftermath…when lust and hunger are satiated and you are safe, complete, yourself and yet without self at the same time. It is the instant when lovers feel almost as if they have stopped time with their passion.” (231)

Stopping time brings us back to the idea of history and how, in this particular genre, there’s bound to an interesting dynamic between the lives of the characters and the ‘life of the times” (zeitgeist) in which they live. In the next post, I’ll google some reviews and try to answer some of the questions that other readers have. In general, I hope it’s obvious that I enjoyed the novel, raced through it in four or five days, and am now “picking at hairs.”

(DF)

Poe’s detective stories from the 1840s introduced the world to a new genre of fiction in which a crime-solving protagonist matches wits against both the criminal underworld as well as the reader, since part of the “narrative device” from which detective fiction derives its power involves the reader’s own attempts to “read between the lines” and arrive at the solution before (or in tandem with) the detective.

A number of interesting riffs on the old theme have been developed by writers over the years, helping the genre achieve a literary quality that many consider “a cut above” mere formula. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett exploited the ambiguity of the hard-boiled gumshoe whose methods bordered on the criminal and whose final solution and close proximity to the underworld result in a world of moral uncertainty. More recently, Walter Mosley introduced the African-American detective Easy Rawlins, whose uneasy relationship to a dominant white culture in 1960s Los Angeles (before and after the Watts riots) creates a backdrop of constant tension as the character tries to balance various commitments.

As a quick glance at the Google results suggests, one of the reasons Leon’s novels are popular is because they avoid re-romanticizing Venice by showing us the city as particularly challenged by crime. The social commentary is also a significant part of her work, with Through a Glass, Darkly raising issues of environmental degradation (the price of glass?).

As with City of Fallen Angels, it takes a while to find a negative review, but it’s worth trying to find one, since these always provide starting points for discussion. Here is Glenn Harper, who writes for a noir fiction blog:

“I’ve never been sure what it is about Leon’s novels that I’ve found irritating, but this audio version helped me clarify my problem. Her narrative is curiously static, a series of “blackouts,” staged encounters among the characters involved in the mystery and in Brunetti’s conflicted relationships with his superiors and bureaucrats in general. These encounters move the story forward, but within each set-piece, not much happens except for conversation that is more or less indirect in relation to the murder at the center of the story. This method works very well to edge the reader toward Leon’s famous inconclusive endings (her murderers rarely seem to go to jail, protected by family, by conspiracies of silence, and by the powers that be in Venice). But the novels are hardly thrillers, and there’s frequently not much going on. In the case of Through the Glass Darkly, a lot of these scenes are quite funny, in satirical and ironic dialogues that Brunetti has with his wife, with the estimable Signorina Elettra, with his boss the Vice Questore, and with various workers and their families on the island of Murano. There are also, of course, numerous grotesqueries regarding the murder, but curiously, a gruesome death draws little comic interplay among the presumably hardened cops–most of whom flee the scene retching.”

(http://internationalnoir.blogspot.com/2008/02/donna-

leon-through-glass-darkly.html)

There is some truth to what Harper is complaining about, but rather than taking us away from the “action,” I found these scenes interesting in their removal from the immediate necessities of the “who-dunnit.” We get a LOT of character development, as well as some interesting sidebar chacacters (in my next post I’ll have a brief note about Scarpa, Brunetti’s superior (not the Vice-Questore but another investigator) and the mysterious Mary Dox, whose function in the “narrative device” is to get the plot moving. But back to the sidebar scenes that Harper objects to: these are the life of the novel, in essence: Brunetti staring at the workmanship of glass vessels in an exhibit, as well as the two domestic scenes in which we get numerous details about the food. What Harper calls “indirect in relation to the murder at the center of the story,” I find a welcome riff on the way that detective novels usually proceed, which is all too direct. Still, Harper’s observation is accurate: we don’t even get a body until page 159 (!!), about halfway through the novel. Compare this with Chandler’s violent accumulation of bodies that always seem to produce a victim by the end of the first few chapters.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a “non-case” (126) and that Brunetti isn’t quite free to conduct the investigation in the open without fearing that his boss will fire him. Here is another instance of the “indirection” that I think ultimately makes this novel’s unusual pacing (for its genre) exceptional: “Brunetti’s experience and his reading of history had led him to believe that, given the right pressure, almost anyone could be moved to confess to anything.” (149) As a reader of history rather than literature (which his wife studies in an academic capacity), Brunetti’s approach to reality inherently recognizes the equivalent that ‘history is written by the victors’ and is ‘always-already’ subjective.

Brunetti offers a favorable match with Poe’s recipe for the discerning hero of the detective novel, who must “makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe.” (Poe. “Murders in the Rue Morgue” online text; see also “The Purloined Letter” as well as the Lacan essay that literary theorists have had a field day with.)

There are also moments of wonderful description that Leon is well known for and that provide a literary quality to the prose. On his way to see the body early in the morning, Brunetti sees a historical apparition, something he had

“…only seen in photos taken in the early part of the last century: the mirror-smooth waters of the Grand Canal.” (…) “He stood transfixed and looked on what his ancestors had seen: the same light, the same facades, the same windows and plants, and the same vital silence. And, as far as he could distinguish the reflections, it all existed in double.” (161)

For Book Club Discussion this Saturday July 26, 10:00 - 12:00:

David Francis, davidtfrancis@hotmail.com
Domestic interludes
214 – 228
255 – 263

Mary Dox
132 – 133
150 – 152
156 – 157
298 – 300

Details of the murder

183
185
199 – 200
230 – 232
238

Dante’s Inferno

186
208 – 210
234 – 235

Scarpa

150
152—153
238
317 – 318

For a long list of book reviews for “City of Fallen Angels,” see http://www.metacritic.com/books/authors/berendtjohn/cityoffallingangels#critics

Mostly, reviews were positive when the book came out in 2005.

Reading “Angels,” you become aware of how important the arts are to the life of a city — and at the same time, how the art scene can seem to be dominated by cliques of snobs…

The long section about the non-profit Save Venice and the feuding among board members reminds me of the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle (www.cocaseattle.org), where I’ve survived three years on the board. CoCA is currently in loco parentis — almost being held hostage — by a catering company called Apulent, but enough of such gossip. Unlike Berendt, I would go crazy in Venice by myself for months on end attending parties and working on a book that reads at times like the “society pages” of a city newspaper. One of my points of departure on June 28 will be the role of the narrator in non-fiction — the elusive Berendt himself, about whom we are told almost nothing. On page 45, for example, we get as close as we’re ever going to get: “Within days of my arrival, I began to consider the idea of extending my stay in Venice for a while…I would have no fixed agenda, but I would look more at the people…”

Here is The Guardian’s Peter Conrad, one of the few critics that openly disliked the book:

“It’s not only the ethics of his procedure that make me uncomfortable; I’m even more bothered by the clunkily implausible aesthetics of his reportage. To pass off his sleuthing research as narrative, he has to coax his informants to mouth paragraphs of dreary exposition disguised as cocktail-party chitchat.

One of these stooges, as wooden as a ventriloquist’s dummy, delivers the following speech: ‘Henry James, a frequent house-guest, used the Barbaro as the model for the fictional Palazzo Leporelli in his masterpiece The Wings of the Dove.’ Positively trips off the tongue, doesn’t it?

There is plenty of such stuff, which in Hollywood they call ‘backstory’; unfortunately there’s no main story for it to back up. The Fenice fire was blamed on two dozy electricians, one of whom skipped bail before he could be sent to jail; there are hints about Mafia involvement, but nothing was ever proved, so the outcome remains banal and unsatisfactory.

Aware of the anticlimax, Berendt arranges diversions, straying off to sniff out other nasty episodes elsewhere. Yet the dynastic sagas he relates all sound like back-fence tittle-tattle, engrossing to the neighbours and to no one else. Do you really care about the venomous warfare between a pair of American plutocrats who squabble for precedence in a charitable foundation?”

This is a good question, and it makes me ambivalent. Ordinarily my answer is “no, I do not find such material interesting.” But Berendt pulls it off fairly well — at the core of the book, the reason such banalities are interesting is that they reflect how contentious the art scene can be when what’s at stake is power, the control of objects of value –

Conrad’s full review is in two parts:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/travel/0,6121,1587973,00.html
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/travel/0,6121,1587973,00.html#article_continue

DF

June 24, 2008

A simple machine for narrative. By spinning the five rods and sliding the card up or down, various fragments are generated that can lead in surprising directions. The question becomes, ‘to what extent does the user become the author or narrator’?

Again, Berendt, p. 45: “Within days of my arrival, I began to consider the idea of extending my stay in Venice for a while…I would have no fixed agenda, but I would look more at the people…” This too is a narrative “machine,” albeit less literal: a modus operandi, an “m.o.” –

http://www.absinthe-literary-review.com/poetics/francis.htm

The Museum’s exhibition Lino Tagliapietra in Retrospect: A Modern Renaissance in Italian Glass features the work of an artist who lives and works on Murano, the island of glassblowers in the Venetian lagoon.

This, summer, you are invited to read three books that are set in Lino’s world of Venice, Italy and join other Museum Members and David Francis, PhD in lively once-a-month book club discussion.

Saturday, June 28, 10:00 am · MOG Theater

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt is a contemporary non-fiction work that explores aspects of life in Venice, including the fire that destroyed its treasured Fenice Opera House, producing flames that inspired a series of work by aging glass artist Archimede Seguso.

Saturday, July 26, 10:00 am · MOG Theater

Through A Glass, Darkly by Donna Leon takes readers inside the secretive islands of Murano, home of the world-famous glass factories where the cynical Commissario Brunetti investigates a murder. One of the suspects is an old but very strong glassblower with a volatile temper…

Saturday, August 23, 10:00 am · MOG Theater

In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant is a powerfully descriptive story of Venice in the 1500’s. The seductive courtesan Fiammetta and her quick-witted dwarf companion Bucino encounter a city of temptations and dangerous secrets.

Check out the ongoing blog conversation with David Francis through the summer!