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

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