John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels is Venice. In this book, published in 2005, John Berendt gives Venice the same basic treatment he gave Savannah in a previous book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. He has a framework and a construction formula. Select a very interesting city, focus on a calamity there that engages all the wits and gossips, draws all the sidewalk (in this case, canal) superintendents. As the details of the calamity and its aftermath trickle out, Berendt fleshes out his tale show more with what amount to sidebars on ancillary characters and conflicts and entertainments.

Here his main event is a disastrous fire than destroys the Fenice Opera House in January 1996. The Fenice is hundreds of years old. Because the canal adjacent to the structure has been drained for needed repairs and renovation, firefighters can't quickly deluge the blaze. They have to jerry-rig hose-lines through walkways and even through some buildings. In the aftermath, new threads develop, following investigations into the cause, following various plans for reconstruction, following competition for the reconstruction contract. The ornate structure's been expanded, renovated and its interior altered over the years, of course, but the archive of architectural plans, of construction plans, is spotty. Recent photos of the interior spaces are nonexistent.

As this tale unfolds, Berendt intersperses it with sidebars.

• Archimede Seguso, whose apartment is across the canal from the theater is stupified by the inferno, sitting in a chair by a window, watching the fire all night, ignoring pleas from fire officials, his wife, his son to vacate to safety. He is, we learn, a master glassblower, active for 75 years, and now in his late 80s is the patriarch of one of Venice's most significant firms. Berendt recounts the story of glass making in Venice, of family feuds that threaten the creative and business integrity of the firms, and how Signor Seguso energized by the fire.

• A group of wealthy Americans are gathering in Venice, when the fire explodes. These men and women are the leaders of Save Venice, a New York-based charity that funds repairs and restorations. Several own palatial residences bordering the Grand Canal and other waterways. Some represent inherited wealth, while others built their own fortunes. As time passes, these powerful folks get to squabbling amongst themselves. Berendt tells pretty much of it.

• Ezra Pound was long a resident of Venice, where he lived with his mistress of 50 years, Olga Rudge. When Pound, then his widow, died in the early 1970s, Olga was left in possession of their house and several large chests with the poet and editor's papers. Berendt is drawn to the end-of-life machinations to gain control of those papers and the house. (Now I have to read Pound and about Pound!)

Oh, there's a lot more. Anecdotes about daily life in a city without cars. Profiles on the rich, the aristocratic, the political, even ordinary mortals. Can you tell that I really enjoyed this book?

What's missing? Photos and drawings. How can you tell about this unique city and its artistic and architectural wonders, about a devastating fire and an enormously complicated construction without SHOWING at least a handful of pictures. The endpapers are printed with a marvellous bird-eye view of the city with many buildings highlighted. But it isn't enough. Check Google Maps as you read. show less

Delicious, shimmering prose. Wonderful story. Savannah really should give Mr. Berendt a pension.

I have to dim my searchlight to a streetlight. Still think it's good but now, well, now I can't see past the one-hit-wonderness to the glories I once took for granted.

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: Bored Manhattanite journalist realizes, back in the 1980s, that lunch at a trendy restaurant costs more than air fare to a sexy Southern retreat (those were the days!) and the resulting show more experience was more lasting. So John Berendt becomes a commuter to Savannah, Georgia, which is the American Bath for sheer physical prettiness, though quite a lot hotter.

Being a good journalist, he meets everyone worth meeting, and being a gay man, meets the entire A list of gay life in this small city in record time. Then he stumbles into an amazing story of murder and skulduggery among the social elite as the elite intersects with gay and gay-for-pay culture.

Along the way he talks to every single interesting person in Savannah and builds a word-picture of its typically Southern hierarchical social scene. As The Lady Chablis, an African-American drag queen would say, "Flawless!"

My Review: Not exactly flawless, but wonderful. Southern characters abound, including the old root woman who introduces Yankee John to the world of the haints and spitits and loa that Southerners, even the Babdiss ones, are aware exists, even when they scream and rail about it as evil, wrong, bad...well, they do that about sex too, and with as much effect.

Cemetery dirt is a powerful ingredient in the sympathetic magic the old root women practice. Where it comes from, that is whose grave it was, matters, as do many other factors, and Yankee John reports with wide-eyed fascination on the entire experience of getting involved in the magical universe to help an accused murderer.

The end of the story is, very sadly, the end of a single book career. [The City of Falling Angels] notwithstanding, this is Mr. B's one book. Fortunately, it's a very good one. Unfortunately, it's the only one. And so I ding a half-star off for literary incomplete pass. But it's a helluva read! show less

I don't read a lot of non-fiction but once in a while, I get a book recommendation from someone I really trust and then I have to read it. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is so full of weird and eccentric characters that you forget you're reading a true story. It's got drag queens, invisible dogs, aging society darlings, a murder...and that's just the first half of the book. (If you've seen the movie, forget it - read the book.) Plus now I have to plan a trip to Savannah, Georgia.

I wish John Berendt had written a different book about Venice. One that was about the real inhabitants and daily lives of Venetians. It's one of those places where the myth and exclamations and romanticism of tourists overshadow the fact that for some people, it's just home. There are pluses (the last train to the mainland leaves at 9 pm, and it's expensive to stay at a hotel in the city, so the majority of the tourists clear out for the night) and minuses (oh, those tourists and their show more obsession with the pigeons in Piazza San Marco), but there are also many unique aspects as a result of its geography if nothing else. At first, I thought this was the book Berendt had written - he started off talking about the fire that destroyed the Fenice Opera House shortly before he arrived in Venice to start writing this book. This led to an interlude about a master glassblower who was inspired to create pieces representative of what he saw as he watched the building burn.

I was even with Berendt when he started talking to the expatriates from whom he rented his apartment. Although the couple were somewhat annoying, they were also able to provide an interesting perspective on the city and its ways, a sort of insider-outsider's view. But from this point on, the whole book went down a path I wasn't that enthralled with. The people Berendt talked to and about were often not native Venetians, and usually prominent and filthy rich. The type of thing I enjoy hearing about: Venetians always embellish, and if you don't do the same, they'll be first suspicious and then bored of you. The type of thing I don't enjoy hearing about: someone who has a replica of Casanova's gondola made for their use. A thing that is interesting: Venice is a terrible city for the elderly because of the amount of walking (including up and down bridges) that is required. A thing that is not so interesting: how many doges some count has had in his family. Interesting: why people's feelings about Venice take the form of wanting to "save" it (as one person said, "Why does everyone want to save Venice? Why don't they want to save Paris?"). Not interesting: the infighting on the board of the Save Venice organization and whose name goes at the top of a plaque. The family of long-term expatriates (multiple generations) who own a palace managed to straddle the line, although I think I would have liked hearing about them more if the focus hadn't been on so many other fabulously wealthy people.

And through all these stories, Berendt keeps going back to the fire at the Fenice, with the narrative centering around who set the fire (or if it was an accident, but let's get real - it's obvious it was arson). That story would have made a pretty involving article, but it was dragged out and out to make it last through the book's entirety. Toward the end, I started wondering if Berendt had started the fire to give himself something to write about. My advice: read some other book on Venice. I don't know which one, but another one. show less