Tag: Venice

Venetian Vespers by John Banville

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So far my experience of John Banville’s writing has been limited to Prague Nights, one of his mystery novels published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. I’ve been meaning to try more of his books and when I saw this one, I was immediately drawn to it by the title and the beautiful cover (I love a Venetian setting).

Venetian Vespers is set at the turn of the 20th century and begins with writer Evelyn Dolman and his wife Laura on their way to Venice for a belated honeymoon – the reason for the delay is that Laura’s father died just after their marriage. Evelyn had been expecting Laura to inherit her father’s fortune, but due to some sort of conflict that Evelyn doesn’t fully understand, his father-in-law left everything to his other daughter instead. This is disappointing for Evelyn – but then, their whole marriage has been a disappointment so far and isn’t showing any signs of improving.

On their first night in Venice, Evelyn meets Frederick FitzHerbert, a man who claims to have been at school with him, although Evelyn can’t remember him at all. He doesn’t like to admit this, though, so falls into conversation with Freddie and is introduced to his beautiful sister, Francesca. Returning drunk to the palazzo near St Mark’s Square where he and Laura are staying, Evelyn behaves so badly towards his wife that when he wakes up in the morning she has disappeared. Despite feeling ashamed of himself, he makes no real attempt to find Laura, too distracted by thoughts of Francesca. But are Francesca and her brother really who they say they are and what do they want with Evelyn?

It’s obvious to the reader from early on that the FitzHerberts are con artists of some sort, but what we don’t know is what they’re hoping to achieve or why they’ve picked Evelyn as their target. We also don’t know what has happened to Laura, so there’s plenty of tension and mystery. However, the whole novel is narrated by Evelyn from a point in the future, which means there’s lots of foreshadowing and comments like “looking back, I can see” and “If I’d known then what I know now” and I found this a bit annoying. Also, all the foreshadowing and hinting meant I spent most of the book waiting for something dramatic to happen and when it eventually did, very late in the book, I felt slightly let down.

The book is beautifully written, though! Banville uses language appropriate to the period, with every word and phrase carefully chosen so that you could almost imagine it was written in an earlier time. It’s also extremely atmospheric. I love Venice but have only been there in the summer, in hot, sunny weather; Evelyn is there in the winter and the Venice he describes is a gloomy, sinister, forbidding place – “that place of glancing lights, distorting reflections, looming shadows”. It’s the perfect backdrop for the unpleasant, unlikeable characters (even our narrator is an awful person).

Although I couldn’t quite manage to love this book, I enjoyed it more than the other one I read by Banville and was captivated by the haunting portrayal of Venice and the tense, unsettling atmosphere. An ideal read for cold, dark evenings.

Thanks to Faber & Faber for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric – #DoorstoppersInDecember

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I loved Michelle Lovric’s The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters – it was one of my books of the year in 2014, the year it was published – and I’ve always intended to read more of her work. I finally picked up her 2010 novel, The Book of Human Skin, in the summer, but when I saw how long it was (512 pages) I decided to save it for Laura’s Doorstoppers in December event instead!

I didn’t love this book quite as much as Harristown Sisters, but it’s still a fascinating story. Set in Venice and Peru around the turn of the 19th century, it has five very different narrators. The character around whom everything else revolves is Marcella Fasan, a young woman from an aristocratic Venetian family. From birth, Marcella has been the subject of her brother’s hatred and envy – being twelve years older, Minguillo has always expected to be the sole heir to the family fortune and he resents the arrival of a baby sister who poses a threat to his inheritance.

As the years go by, Minguillo’s treatment of Marcella becomes increasingly cruel and brutal, until her friends decide it’s time to intervene. One of these is Gianni, a servant in the Fasan household. Minguillo believes him to be stupid and illiterate, but this is far from the truth and Gianni uses Minguillo’s misconceptions to his advantage. There’s also Santo Aldobrandini, a young surgeon who develops his skills treating the wounded in Napoleon’s army before making his way to Venice where he falls in love with Marcella. When he hears of what Marcella has suffered at her brother’s hands he’s determined to do whatever he can to rescue her.

The perspective switches between these four characters – and a fifth I haven’t mentioned yet – as they take turns to tell the story. The strongest and most unusual narrative voice is Gianni’s; although he’s far more intelligent than Minguillo assumes and has learned to read and write, his grasp of the written language is still not very good and he spells words phonetically or uses the wrong word in place of the right one. I found this annoying and distracting at first, but eventually got used to it – and it does result in some amusing spelling mistakes, such as hair for heir, aunts for ants or storks for stalks. Minguillo’s narration is also very distinctive due to him being so malicious, spiteful and sadistic. Despite this, as a storyteller he’s clever and charming, which makes his parts of the novel very compelling as well as horribly disturbing.

The fifth narrator is Sor Loreta, a nun at the convent of Santa Catalina in Arequipa, Peru. Sor Loreta is a religious fanatic, convinced that she has been chosen by God and that she is on the path to sainthood. She despises anyone who stands in her way or tries to reason with her – and this includes the prioress, who believes Sor Loreta is deluded and insane. This storyline seems very separate from the others, particularly as it’s taking place in a completely different country, but they do all come together in the end!

You may be wondering about the title of the novel. Well, one of Minguillo’s interests is collecting books bound in human skin. Gruesome as it may sound, there really was a demand for these books, which peaked in the 19th century, and it’s not surprising that a character as wicked and cold-blooded as Minguillo would be drawn to a hobby like this.

Finally, I need to mention the historical note at the back of the book. It’s so long it’s practically a whole non-fiction book in its own right! Lovric tells us which characters were fictional and which were based on real people, before going into a lot of depth on various historical aspects of the book, particularly the history of Venetian and Peruvian nuns and what it was like to live in a convent. It’s much more detailed than you would usually expect an author’s note to be and it was very interesting to read.

As it turns out, this was the perfect time for me to read this book because a sequel, The Puffin, has recently been announced for publication in 2026. I was also interested to learn that one of the characters in the book, the painter Cecilia Cornaro, is the subject of one of Lovric’s earlier novels, Carnevale, so I’ll have to look for that one as well.

The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier

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Having enjoyed some of Tracy Chevalier’s previous books I was particularly looking forward to this one because of the setting. It takes place on Murano, an island in the Venetian Lagoon which for centuries has been associated with glass making. It begins in the 15th century but doesn’t remain in that time period because, Chevalier tells us, time works differently there – more on that later!

1486 is when we first meet Orsola Rosso, the eldest daughter of a Murano glassmaking family. Working with glass is considered a man’s job, but Orsola feels that glassmaking is in her blood and longs to have the same opportunities as her brothers. When her father is killed in an accident in the workshop and the family begin to struggle both financially and creatively, Orsola comes up with a plan to earn some extra money by making glass beads. Despite bead making being looked down on by men as not ‘real’ glassmaking, it’s difficult, intricate work and takes Orsola a lot of time and effort to master, but eventually she learns the necessary skills and is helping to keep the family business afloat.

In 1574, the Rosso family experience more hardships when plague makes its way across the water from Venice to Murano – but this is where time begins to move strangely. Although many decades have gone by, the characters have barely aged at all and the story just continues within this new setting as if nothing unusual has happened. We jump forward in time several more times throughout the book until we are brought right up to date with the Covid pandemic – and still Orsola and the other central characters remain unaware that they should have been dead for hundreds of years! I don’t think I’ve read another novel that handles time in this exact way; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando has a similar concept, but it only involves one or two characters rather than the entire cast, and she plays with gender as well as age. John Boyne’s The Thief of Time also has a protagonist who doesn’t age, but he is at least aware that something odd is going on. What Chevalier does here is different and I think readers will either dislike it or just accept and enjoy it.

The device Chevalier uses to tell the story has two advantages. The first is that it allows her to give an overview of the history of Venice and Murano from the 1400s to the modern day and explore the ways in which things have changed over the centuries (plagues, two world wars, increasing tourism, competition affecting Venice’s position as a centre of trade). The second is that she can focus on developing one set of characters – including Orsola and her brothers and sisters, her lover Antonio, the German merchant Klingenberg and the African gondolier Domenego – instead of introducing new generations. Still, I think I would have been just as happy if the book had been set entirely in one of the earlier time periods, as they were the ones that interested me most.

A lot of Chevalier’s novels tend to deal with specific crafts or vocations: embroidery and bell ringing in A Single Thread; fossil collecting in Remarkable Creatures; or growing apple trees in At the Edge of the Orchard. Obviously in this book it’s the making of glass and beads and we learn a lot about the skills required, the methods used and the personal touches each individual glassmaker brings to their work. I’m fortunate enough to have visited both Venice and Murano and seen a glass blowing demonstration so I could easily picture some of the things and places Chevalier describes, but even if you haven’t she does an excellent job of bringing them to life. This is a fascinating book and I did enjoy it, even if I wasn’t completely convinced by the time travel element!

Thanks to The Borough Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book 46/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Hawker and the King’s Jewel by Ethan Bale

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The Wars of the Roses is one of my favourite periods of history to read about and I’m always looking out for new books, both fiction and non-fiction, that explore the key events, colourful figures and controversial mysteries of this fascinating era.

Ethan Bale’s new novel, Hawker and the King’s Jewel, begins just before the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485 with King Richard III summoning his loyal knight, Sir John Hawker, to send him on one last mission. Richard possesses a valuable jewel, one of the legendary Tears of Byzantium, and he wants Hawker to return it to its previous owner, the Doge of Venice. He also has another request to make of Hawker – to take care of his illegitimate son, Sir Giles Ellingham, who is unaware of his true parentage. Hawker promises to carry out both tasks, but when Richard falls in battle and Henry Tudor takes the crown, the situation becomes much more dangerous. Not only are those who supported Richard now seen as traitors, but Sir Giles could become a focus for both Tudor and Yorkist conspiracies.

The action moves from Bosworth to Flanders and then on to Venice, where most of the story unfolds. Hawker is accompanied by his young squire and a small band of mercenary soldiers, so you can expect some battle scenes, as well as smaller-scale fights and skirmishes (including the mock battles known as battagliola, staged on the bridges of medieval Venice). I was concerned at first that there would be too much of this in the book for my taste, but that wasn’t the case and there were plenty of other things to hold my interest – some political intrigue, a fascinating theory to explain the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower, and even a touch of romance as we discover that Hawker has been in Venice before and left a lover behind there.

Although Sir John Hawker is the main character, the other men who make up his little band become more fully developed as the book progresses. I found one of them particularly intriguing as his motives for remaining with Hawker’s company seem to change continuously as he reassesses the political situation and tries to decide whether loyalty or betrayal will be more to his advantage. There’s also an interesting female character – a Hungarian noblewoman with her eye on the jewel Hawker is carrying – and her storyline helps to carry the novel through to its conclusion.

It seems that this is the first book in a planned series, Swords of the White Rose. I’ll be looking out for the next one.

Thanks to Canelo Adventure for providing a copy of this book for review.

This is book 48/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

The Colour Storm by Damian Dibben

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Damian Dibben’s previous novel, Tomorrow, was a fascinating and unusual story of an immortal dog searching for his master across two centuries (it was better than it sounds, honestly!). I was curious to see what his next book, The Colour Storm, would be like, but it turns out that it’s a much more conventional historical novel this time. It’s also a very good one; although the subject reminded me of another of my recent reads, The Fugitive Colours by Nancy Bilyeau, the setting gives it a very different feel.

The Colour Storm is the story of the Italian painter Giorgio Barbarelli, who lived and worked in Venice during the Renaissance. He was a real person, as are many of the other characters in the novel, and you may already be familiar with his paintings – if not, you can easily find images online of some of the pieces attributed to him which will give you an idea of the quality of his work.

At the beginning of the novel, Barbarelli – or ‘Zorzo’ as he is called throughout the book – is finding life difficult. Work is becoming hard to find, the competition from other artists is fierce and Zorzo’s debts are increasing. He’s responsible not only for himself, but also for his team of young apprentices and assistants, so he urgently needs to find some way of gaining commissions from rich clients. An opportunity arises when a wealthy German merchant, Jakob Fugger, arrives in Venice and is said to be looking for an artist to paint an altarpiece for St Peter’s Basilica. When Zorzo hears that Fugger also possesses a new colour, a pigment known as ‘prince orient’, he becomes even more determined to bring himself to the merchant’s attention.

In an attempt to win Fugger’s favour, Zorzo agrees to paint a portrait of his wife, Sybille – but as he becomes closer to Sybille, he finds that he has become involved in a conspiracy which could have huge implications for the people of Europe. And then, while Zorzo is still considering his next move, a new threat arrives in Venice…the plague:

Only the poorest folk, who have no choice but to go to work, are continuing as normal, but they’re wary, treading more carefully than usual. Many cover their faces with their sleeves or improvised masks and everyone keeps their distance. From behind closed windows and shutters, Zorzo’s aware of families pressed together, restless shadows, watching and fretting as to whether this episode will pass – as most do – without significant horror, or if this one will be severe.

Still very relevant, isn’t it? The plague plays a part in the later stages of the novel, but before that we follow the story of Zorzo’s search for the prince orient and his entanglement with Jakob and Sybille (also real historical figures). We are given some insights into the workings of an artist’s studio in Renaissance Venice and there are appearances by other famous names from the art world, including Bellini, Titian, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. By focusing on the dark side of life in 16th century Venice, Dibben creates plenty of atmosphere, and although the parts of the book that concentrate on Zorzo’s relationships with Sybille and her husband interested me less, I found this an enjoyable read overall.

Thanks to Michael Joseph for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 4/20 from my 20 Books of Summer list.

This is book 30/50 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

Mini-reviews: Ashes; A Net for Small Fishes; The Lost Diary of Venice

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Although I usually devote an entire post on my blog to every book I read, sometimes I find that I have very little to say. That’s not always necessarily a reflection on the quality of the book or how much I enjoyed it, but more an inability to put into words my thoughts about a particular book and an awareness that if I don’t just write something soon I will never get round to reviewing it at all! Three of my recent reads fall into that category, so here are a few paragraphs about each of them:

The first is Ashes by Christopher de Vinck, a novel set in Belgium during World War II. Simone Lyon, the daughter of a major general in the Belgian army, meets Hava Daniels while volunteering with the Red Cross in 1939 and despite their different backgrounds – Hava’s family are Jews from Poland – the two become close friends. In those innocent days at the beginning of the war, the girls believe their country will remain safe and neutral, untouched by the horrors starting to sweep across the rest of Europe. Less than a year later, Brussels is under German occupation and Hava and Simone become caught up in everything they’d hoped to avoid.

I found this a moving portrayal of friendship and loyalty, although I struggled to believe that Simone and Hava were really supposed to be eighteen years old as they felt a lot younger than that to me – in fact, I thought the whole story and the way in which it was written felt more like YA fiction than adult. Not a problem, but not what I’d expected! It was interesting to read about the Holocaust from a Belgian perspective and the quotes from politicians, news articles and Nazi propaganda which begin every chapter help to put everything into historical context, but the story was not quite as harrowing as books on this topic usually are. Maybe that was due to the pacing, as a lot more time is spent on building up Hava and Simone’s friendship than on describing the events that follow the Nazi invasion. Overall, this was a worthwhile read, but just didn’t have the sort of depth I prefer in a novel.

A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago is set much earlier, in Jacobean England, and tells the story of the real life Thomas Overbury Scandal from the perspective of Anne Turner, one of the people involved in the crime. Anne, the wife of a London physician, is also a businesswoman in her own right, holding the patent for yellow starch for collars and ruffs. Early in the novel, she becomes dresser and companion to Frances Howard, the young Countess of Essex – and when Frances falls in love with Robert Carr, the king’s favourite, it is Anne to whom she turns for help. Frances wants to marry Robert, but his friend Sir Thomas Overbury stands in their way; if only she and Anne could somehow get rid of him!

I think I would probably have enjoyed this book more if I hadn’t already read several other versions of the Overbury story, most recently EC Fremantle’s The Poison Bed and Rafael Sabatini’s The Minion. Being familiar with the story in advance took away the suspense and what was left wasn’t really enough to hold my attention. The choice of Anne as narrator, while interesting from the point of view of showing us how an ordinary citizen of the time might have viewed royalty and courtiers, took us further from the action, often leaving a sense that all the excitement was happening elsewhere. I also found Anne’s habit of referring to Frances as ‘Frankie’ very irritating as I didn’t think that name was in common use in the early 17th century. This book just wasn’t for me, but most of the other reviews I’ve seen are much more positive than mine! I do like the title, which is a reference to ‘small fishes’ being caught in the net of justice while the larger fish swim away.

The Lost Diary of Venice by Margaux DeRoux is a dual timeline novel; the present day narrative follows Rose, an expert in book restoration from Connecticut, and the historical one is set in Renaissance Italy. The connection between the two comes when William, an artist, brings a 16th century manuscript into Rose’s bookshop. Rose quickly discovers that the document is a palimpsest, where one set of words has been written over another which has been scraped away. On the surface it is a treatise on art by the great Italian painter Giovanni Lomazzo, but it’s the hidden diary entries and sketches underneath that really intrigue Rose and William.

It’s often the case that when a novel is set in two time periods, I like one much more than the other; with this novel, however, I didn’t find either of them very compelling. The book is well written, with some beautiful descriptions of Venice in the historical sections, but I didn’t feel any emotional connection to any of the characters. Rose’s relationship with the married William didn’t interest me and I was unmoved by Giovanni’s romance with the courtesan Chiara too (although I did have some sympathy for Giovanni as he discovered that he was losing his sight, a terrible thing for an artist to have to come to terms with). I also loved the glimpses we are given of the political situation in Venice at that time, the conflict between the Venetians and the Ottoman Empire, and the events taking place in Cyprus ahead of the Battle of Lepanto. I wished more time had been spent on all of this, as every time I started to become gripped by what was happening, the chapter ended and we switched back to the modern day story. This is not a book I can say I particularly enjoyed, but I’m pleased I was at least able to learn something from it.

Have you read any of these? If so, let me know what you thought.

Book 10, 11 and 12/50 read for the 2021 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Crimson and Bone by Marina Fiorato

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It’s January 1853 and seventeen-year-old Annie Stride is standing on Waterloo Bridge looking down at the River Thames, contemplating suicide. Having grown up in the East End of London as part of a large and impoverished family, Annie has drifted into a life of prostitution. Her only friend, Mary Jane, drowned in the Thames the previous year and now, pregnant and homeless, Annie has decided she has no choice but to do the same. Just as she gets ready to jump from the bridge, she is rescued at the last minute by a handsome young man who introduces himself as Francis Maybrick Gill.

Francis is a talented Pre-Raphaelite artist who is planning a new series of paintings on the subject of the ‘Fallen Woman’ – and he wants Annie to be his model. And so Annie, who had been only moments away from death, finds herself living with Francis in his large and luxurious Gower Street home, posing for portraits of Eve, Rahab and Jezebel. As well as using Annie as his muse, Francis also takes steps to improve her mind, to correct her East End speech and to help her with her reading and writing. She has no idea why he is taking so much interest in her, but she is so grateful she doesn’t care – until late one night two visitors come to call and Annie begins to wonder whether Francis Maybrick Gill is really the man she thought he was.

Crimson and Bone, Marina Fiorato’s latest novel, is divided into three parts and everything I have described above happens in the first part alone. The action also moves away from London for a while to Florence and Venice; Fiorato, who is half-Venetian herself, always writes beautifully about Italy and we are given some lovely, vivid descriptions of the country. The author’s love of art also shines through, with lots of information on the Pre-Raphaelite approach to art, exhibitions at the Royal Academy, the symbolism in the paintings for which Annie models, and, through the character of a mysterious ‘rainbow man’, the origins of the paints and pigments Francis uses.

From the beginning, the reader is kept in the dark as to Francis’s motives. What are his true plans for Annie? Does he really just want to paint her or does he have some other reason for his sudden interest in her? And what is the significance of his obsession with white camellias? A series of diary entries written by Annie’s friend Mary Jane appear at the start of each chapter which eventually shed some light on things, while also raising more questions along the way. It’s obvious that something is not quite right with the whole situation, but we don’t know what or why and the tension builds slowly throughout the novel.

However, there are a few inaccuracies and anachronisms which do spoil the book somewhat – for example, Annie tries to improve her speech by listening to gramophone records (several decades before they would have been available) and is taken to the theatre to see performances of Pygmalion (not staged until 1913) and Adelaide Neilson in Measure for Measure (more than twenty years too early). Admittedly, not knowing anything about Adelaide Neilson, I wasn’t aware of the third one until someone else pointed it out in their review, but it makes me wonder what else I might have been too caught up in the story to notice.

And the fact that I became so caught up in the story and the atmosphere – and that I cared about what happened to Annie – meant that I did enjoy this novel overall, despite its flaws.

This is book 15/20 of my 20 Books of Summer challenge.