Across the Bridge of Sighs: More Venetian Stories [Hardcover]

Jane Turner Rylands (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 22, 2005

In these twelve wry, captivating stories, Jane Turner Rylands returns with more tales about the mysterious day-to-day life of Venetians, in which the conflicting forces of progress and tradition are very much at odds.

Once again we become insiders, let in on the attitudes and habits of characters from all strata of Venetian society—from very different backgrounds and neighborhoods—in one of the world’s most unknowable cities. Rylands makes us understand the subtle hierarchies of this Byzantine society with all its robust snobberies. The unique quirks, petty rivalries, and jealousies that lie just beneath the city’s elegant veneer are brilliantly observed.

Unforgettable characters from Rylands’s first collection make return appearances in several stories, and many new figures are introduced. An unscrupulous former race-car driver unveils a plan to save Venice; a fiendish son plans an aphrodisiac dinner; superstition and a possible curse add to a family’s very contemporary troubles over the restoration of their ancient palazzo, where a struggle ensues between decline and change.

As always with Rylands’s stories, we are easily drawn into this sophisticated but ultimately small-town world, and we come to understand the eccentricities of its citizens and the fragility of their future. In Across the Bridge of Sighs, Jane Turner Rylands evokes the poignant and lively world of one of our most cherished cities with all the power of a master storyteller.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This follow-up to Rylands's debut, Venetian Stories (2003), features a similar cast of fallen aristocrats, social climbers, workaday Venetians and their respective hangers-on. When Baroness Sofi Patristi finally divorces her serially philandering husband to marry the architect Vittorio Fallon in "Restoration," the refurbishments they undertake to the family's historic palazzo are interrupted by a tragedy that halts any future plans. In "Fortune," two exes reunite to visit their ne'er do-well-son Bingo. Since the split, Beauregard Benson has started a new life with his German boyfriend, Dieter, and ex-wife Carmenina has a tepid romance brewing with the aging Roman Count Barbaro. At a bourbon-fueled dinner party, raffish journalist Cad Peacock is there to chronicle the discomfiture of all, as is pliant young party girl Rosi Rosso. In "Integration," Contessa Panfili's son and daughter-in-law try to jar her into the modern age through a difficult journey to the garish supermarket on the mainland, mirroring the city's ongoing struggle against an imposed modernity. Rylands sometimes loses her characters in lofty prose (the contessa's loss of a son "clapped over her life like a jar over a bee"). Whether witty or shimmeringly wistful, however, each of the tales Rylands spins prove entertaining, and the interwoven stories borrow from each other's casts with ease. (Nov. 22)
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From Booklist

In this collection of 13 interconnected stories, Rylands picks up masterfully where her previous collection, Venetian Stories (2003), left off. Characters appear and reappear in the various tales, weaving a community that reveals Venice as a tightly knit place. Actually, Venice itself is the main character of the collection. The dramas played out amid the grand old city's canals, squares, palaces, and churches highlight the major theme running throughout: modernity versus tradition. As the latter stubbornly digs in against the encroaching former, many of the stories' human protagonists must negotiate their ways through shifting customs. Others, outsiders come to either live or work in Venice, are the cause of such shifts. For her part, Rylands is an expert at capturing moods that are awkward, or poignant, or even slightly profound in their quotidian aspects--and in Venice, one must remember, the quotidian is never what it is in other places. Individually and as a collective piece, the stories provide a wonderful insight into the author's beloved city. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (November 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375423419
• ISBN-13: 978-0375423413
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,358,284 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This should not be missed..., April 7, 2006

By 

Bookseller (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Across the Bridge of Sighs: More Venetian Stories (Hardcover)

KIRKUS REVIEWS, September 1, 2005:
"The author of Venetian Stories (2003) returns with another enchanting tribute to la Serenissima.
An American who has lived in Venice for more than 30 years, Rylands writes with the simplicity--the apparent transparency--of someone experiencing a world in translation, but she is a singularly perceptive outsider, and her portrait of Venice is finely nuanced. She conveys whole life stories in a few lovel sentences, and she reveals all the charming truths buried within small, inconspicuous encounters. Characters flit through the collection, sometimes in a starring role, sometimes mentioned in passing--just like in life. "Restoration" -- a story of love, fate, and a crumbling palazzo--balances the vicissitudes of reality with fairy-tale undertones, and "Vocation" offers a similar mix of the provident and the pragmatic. "Design" is a sharply hilarious but not unkind portrait of new money triumphant. "Fortune" is a priceless little comedy of manners, a gem that would sine in any setting. Indeed, each entry in this volume stands on its own as a well-crafted and entertaining work of short fiction, but it's only in viewing the collection as a whole that one appreciates the grand scope of Rylands's project. With these subtly intertwined stories, she offers both a telling vision of Venice's current state of entrophy and a carefully hopeful glimpse of its future. Many of the characters in these stories leave Venice, but a few of them return. Foreigners and arrivistes are ejected, but some are embraced. Considered altogether, these stories suggest that the past can only survive when it's married to the future, and that the real wonder of Venice is not its network of canals but its community of people--noble, flawed, loving, spiteful, sad, gracious, interdependent, and wholly human.
Elegant, worldly-wise and as captivating as the city it celebrates."
This says it all.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully enchanting, April 16, 2006

By 

Rivkah Rubinstein (Evanston, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Across the Bridge of Sighs: More Venetian Stories (Hardcover)

Ever since I read Venetian Stories I've been awaiting a sequel with all of the anticipation of a ten-year-old J.K.R. fan. Thank you, Mrs. Rylands, for not disappointing. I savored this book for over a week, trying to carefully digest each vignette before it slipped into the intertwined mass of the whole. Except for being short-changed at every turn, Venice is the best place on earth, and Mrs. Rylands' book only add to the richness that tourists are hard-pressed to appreciate. Bravo!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a slice of Venetian life, June 24, 2007

By 

lisatheratgirl "lisatheratgirl" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Across the Bridge of Sighs: More Venetian Stories (Paperback)

I disagree with the reviewer who said this book didn't bring Venice to life (although there is seemingly nothing about the Bridge of Sighs). First, these are short stories, not a Donna Leon mystery or the Great American-Italian novel. You have to be in the mood for short stories, I think, but if so and they are well written, you have a good read. Second, the stories center around the same people in the same neighborhood, who know each other, are related to one another, know each other's business and personal affairs, etc. Right away this makes the stories more real than a collection of detached tales that have nothing to do with each other. Finally, I haven't been to Venice (would love to go) but I've read a lot about it and these stories seem in agreement with works of other authors. It's good to remember that if you live in a place, New York, London, Paris, Venice, you get a different "feel" for it than does a person who comes for a week for shopping, sightseeing, eating in the best restuarants, going to the theatre. Real life is much the same everywhere in some ways. There is Countess Giulia shlepping her groceries off the bus from the mainland onto a boat to get home. There is Severino living with his parents and paying room and board at 29, probably because life in the city is expensive. A lot of the characters are rich people, I assume that the author knows a lot of rich people. But you get a good dose of reality too. All the small specialty shops going out of business thanks to the big box stores and supermarkets on the mainland. I felt the author gave us a look beyond the romance and the tourist attractions. I intend to find her first book and read it.