Customer Reviews

The City of Falling Angels

5 star:		(84)
4 star:		(53)
3 star:		(42)
2 star:		(39)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

Like so many of the literally millions of readers who found John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" an endless source of pure reading pleasure, I have been eagerly awaiting his next book. Well, the wait was more than worth it. I grabbed my copy of his new book, "City of Falling Angels" the very first day it went on sale. Berendt has now taken us to Venice and he digs beneath its surface--just as he did in Savannah--to find fascinating tales of intrigue, human folly and human decency. I found myself devouring it and yet at the same time wanting to slowly savor its interwoven stories. While the author introduced me to Savannah, with Venice he takes me to a place I thought I knew well--only to discover that I had been the merest of tourists on my many trips there until I had John Berendt as my guide. He goes beneath the obvious fascination of the city's history and art to introduce us to Counts and Marchesas, electricians and fruit-and vegetable sellers, artists and poets, criminals and politicians. In "Falling Angels" the core event is the destruction by fire (arson?) of Venice's famed historic opera house, the Fenice--and the byzantine aftermath of this great loss to the city. But, as in "Midnight," Berendt is not content to merely tell a gripping story. He once again introduces us to a series of memorable characters, some petty and venal, some filled with charm and wisdom, all fascinating. While this book is a work of non-fiction and true in every detail, Berendt has an amazing ability to delve into a place and get its inhabitants to divulge their secrets to him like a great journalist. In "City of Falling Angels," just as in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," he combines this skill with the art of a novelist in getting the people to tell their stories. Such authors as Henry James, Thomas Mann and Daphne du Maurier have famously SET novels and short stories in Venice. John Berendt gets Venice to tell ITS story.

John Berndt hit a home run in 1994 when he wrote Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, an interesting expose about Savannah and some of the more colorful characters that called that wonderful city home. Serving as a focal point was a midnight murder and subsequent murder trial. Midnight in the Garden spent four years on the NYT best seller list and made Berendt a world wide celebrity.

Berendt has released his second book, The City of the Falling Angels and it reminds me a lot of Midnight. First is the location. While I have to admit Savannah and Venice aren't alike, they do both ooze atmosphere. Savannah, quaint but somewhat isolated is so different from the ancient and worldly city of Venice that it seems hard to understand their connection. You'll have to read the book first, but I think you'll see why Berendt selected Venice.

Secondly, Berendt manages to find some really interesting locals to put in the book: Olga, the former mistress of Ezra Pound, an artisan glass blower, the Rat-Man, and pigeon exterminators, et al. These provide the color that was such an interesting part of Midnight.

Finally, the loss of the Fenice Opera House and the subsequent trial of the arsonists gives the book an anchor similar to the murder trial in Midnight.

Berendt is a consumate story teller. His prose is like boating on a calm canal.

Whether The City of Falling Angels can come close to achieving the status and success of Midnight remains to be seen. As for me I found The City of Falling Angels and terrific read.

It seems like whenever there's a good book about a place, we're told "It's so good it makes you want to go there." John Berendt's first book, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" apparently did that for Savannah. But in the case of "The City of Falling Angels", I felt that even if I went to Venice a hundred times, I'd never get the kinds of insights I got from reading this book.

Just the way Venice is so unlike any other place -- a tiny, canal-filled, floating museum of a city that once was actually a world power -- I learned that its inhabitants, perhaps inevitably, are equally unlike those of any other place.

Nowhere but in Venice could I find Massimo Donadon, a "chef" who cornered a whopping 30% of the world's rat poison market by studying different countries' food preferences -- and then making his rat poison taste like those foods, since that's what local rats grow to like after they eat a place's garbage. (Butter for France, pork fat for Germany, curry for India.) And apparently no one but Berendt ever discovered the entertaining, carnivalistic characters like him (and many, many others) -- even though several literary giants, such as Henry James, Thomas Mann, and Ernest Hemingway had their chances.

And there's virtually nothing in "Angels" that you can find in any book of its kind. Or any book, period.

"Angels also has its "serious" side. It meticulously investigates the 1996 fire (accident or arson?) of one of history's most renowned opera houses. And while doing this, it gives us a basic cultural and political portrait of probably the world's most unusual city.

It's obviously tempting to compare "Angels" to "Midnight" -- since it's also about a city, and "Midnight" was such a record-breaking hit. But a much better reason is that it shows that Berendt isn't a one-shot wonder. Nor is he a writer who found subjects so rich that any first-rate writer could have made good books out of the them. It demonstrates that he's a writer who must now be recognized as one of the very best around.

The elegance, ego-lessness, and spareness of his prose are the equal of any contemporary writer I can think of. His writing is never excessive or needlessly detailed -- and it never draws attention to itself or its author.

After I finished "Angels", I wondered what had made it so easy to read. A quick riffle of its pages gave me the answer. Whereas most of our best writers frequently confront me with huge blocks of type -- making me almost want to cry out for oxygen, or peek to see where one of those mountainous paragraphs ends -- Berendt's pages are pleasing to the eye. I know I'll always have breathing space -- and his rhythm will become my rhythm.

It's a shame that his perfectionism has kept him from writing a larger number of books. (And God knows why he chose to start so late.) But one thing is now clear: He's someone from whom we can expect nothing but fine works.

I just hope he doesn't make us wait so long again.

Nevertheless, I'm grateful.

The City of Falling Angels is a non-fiction piece that examines the places and people that populate the city of Venice during the non-tourist season. Part history lesson, part travelogue, with a touch of the National Enquirer type of investigative reporting that keeps you titillated with its "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" approach.

Utilizing the fire that destroyed one of the city's cultural landmarks, the Fenice Opera House, as the glue which holds the various stories together, Berendt interviews a variety of Venetians with backgrounds ranging from titled nobility to the man who developed and sold the rat poison that has made him a millionaire. We are taken on vicarious explorations of grand palaces and tiny cottages and given a tantalizing peek into the public and private lives of Venice inhabitants. From public servants, like Casson, the bulldog-like prosecutor intent on convicting someone (anyone) for the fire, to the likes of Peggy Guggenheim, Ezra Pound and his former mistress and the Seguso family (designers and creators of beautiful and expensive Murano glass pieces).

The story of the fire becomes almost secondary as Berendt traverses other avenues in pursuit of additional stories and alternate truths. Of course, all of the interviews must be viewed with a bit of skepticism when one considers the advise given to the author by Count Marcello who tells him, "Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say". It is ultimately up to the reader to choose what portions are fact and what are seductive fiction.

I noticed some time ago that whenever anyone in a movie goes to Venice, something bad happens. Donald Sutherland gets hacked up by a deranged dwarf, Rupert Everett gets his throat cut by a sadistic admirer, spinster Katherine Hepburn gets her heart broken by a married man. Even Shakespeare had Venice as the setting for intrigue, usury and betrayal. Venice is a place where bad things happen. Now John Berendt, author of MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL, takes on the fabled city at the turn of the new Millennium and achieves some dazzling results. It's still a city of duplicity, con games and corruption despite its glorious artistic, literary and historical heritage. Berent uses the city as the setting for a series of related essays dealing with arson that maybe was not arson, suicide that maybe was murder, feuding old Venetian families, feuding expatriates, duplicitous philanthropists, and out-and-out swindles by supposedly respectable people. Who is lying? Who is telling the truth? Is there such a thing as truth? A lot of this book is very anxiety-inducing, especially those parts dealing with people who are obviously crooks who are obviously going to get away with it. Berendt has the extraordinary gift of being able to write truth as if it were fiction. One of the episodes, "The Man Who Loved Others," could just as easily be anthologized in a collection of great short stories. As a big fan of Berendt's previous book, I dropped everything to read this one. I'm glad I did. This intelligent and literate book is wonderful writing. We'll be talking about it for years to come. I'd especially recommend the book for anyone who has been to Venice or plans to go as well as fans of Henry James. The best parts of this book are as good as the work of James himself.

John Berendt has come through with another great hit, following MIdnight in the Garden of Good and Evil ten years earlier. While, Savannah was the location of his previous title, one can't help but sense an aura of similarities that the author wants to entertain about the people who live in a world within the world.

Interestingly, like the murder in Savannah, the trial of the fire that destroyed Venice's famed opera house Fenice, takes center stage, providing the platform for cultural and historical issues that engulf the Venetians. He portrays the peoples' moods vacillating like the tides of Venice that occur six times a day. The "Venice factor", as described, sets the stage for the players, giving them the space to act accordingly.

Berendt has creatively intertwined the trial of the burning down of Fenice Opera House with true stories, often distancing the Venitians from the Italian way of life, yet, invariably still part of it. He engages in philosophical presentations of how the truth changes according to reflections of ideas, just as sunlight reflects from the window to a vase, etc. It's part of Venice, as even the instruction to follow a straight line, "straight ahead", soon ends up in more turns, curves, and forks.

This is a great book that encompasses a story in real time, inclusive of culture, travelogue, and history. It's a literary achievement of a class author, who has surpassed his first title. We hope he gives us the pleasure of reading his next book.

I stopped reading after page 168. Cold turkey.

I loved "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" so I was pre-disposed to liking "City of Falling Angels." But I just couldn't get into it. It isn't Berendt's writing. It's crisp and his sentences are well constructed and easy to read, as always.

So what is it? I think, suspect, really, that it's because, at least until page 168, the book's mainly been about the rich and "famous" of Venice. Oridnary people, the common man, hardly appear. Yes, there is the rat catcher of Venice, the men who "control" the pigeon population and the man who wears a different uniform every day - really interesting people - but that's about it and their appearances are all to brief. Mostly, "City of Falling Angels" has been about the foibles of rich people - transplanted Americans, in large part. In my book, at least, the rich and privileged of Venice aren't nearly as compelling as the ordinary Venetians who made too brief an appearance. Which leads me to another point, contrasted with the people who made up "Midnight in the Graden of Good and Evil" - the man who wanted to poison the city's water supply, Lady Chablis, etc. - the people who appear in "City of Falling Angels" are positively boring in comparsion - their penchant for wearing nothing but white and transforming rooms in a Venetian palace into a Mars Embassy, notwithstanding.

I was expecting more or, at the very least, different. I didn't want the "grand" stories. I wanted the small but interesting ones about oridnary people. Unfortunately, "City of Falling Angels" isn't about them. And, for me at least, that is a shame.

As a fan of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" I probably am in the same class as most readers of both books in being disappointed by this second one. It has many similarities to the first: both are first person accounts of several years spent as the "outsider" observing the strange customs of an unknown foreign tribe, like an an early explorer in the wilds of who-knows-where. He brought that sense of awe and naivete more believably to us in "Midnight" where the people of Savannah, fellow Americans, did come across as truly an unusual group with customs and ways new and different from the rest of us. Somehow, though Venice is an actual "foreign" city for most of us, it doesn't seem so strange; the author doesn't bring to the table the same sense of excitement, of being in a really new envirnment. And it shouldn't have been that way. There are certainly a large cast of characters; a possible murder that sort of fizzles out; the fire which destroys the old Fenece Opera house, a tragedy for Venetians and Opera lovers; but somehow I never FELT the loss myself...The only one of his little vignettes of which the book is made that I became emotionally involved in was the story of Ezra Pound, and his long-time partner Olga Rudge, their daughter and her family, and the attempts by a nefarious American woman to fleece Olga, then in her 90's, of not just money but more importantly the rights to the papers, and the memorabilia over 50+ years that she had from the late Pound. It is a sad story that if it took place here and now in this country would fall under elder abuse laws, but there and then seemed to have been brushed off by the authorities, and even Ms Rudges' adult daughter and grandson seemed not to be overly concerned though they themselves took a financial loss. Berendt was perhaps prevented from pursuing further into this, but is was by far the most interesting and heart-tugging episode: Olga in her late 90's going by foot to the bank to get some of her papers from Pound and being told no, she couldn't have them, they now belonged to the "Ezra Pound Foundation" that is, the dummy foundation headed by the American woman and her attorney, and to whom Ms Olga Rudge and unwittingly signed over her control of everything she owned, even her house. That story just stops too. All the side stories seem to just end, with no real feeling of completeness. I know its non-fiction, and things don't neatly wrap themselves up, but in some of the cases, thing ends with a sort of flat thud. I also never got a clear visual of Venice, which is odd, the gondoliers, the palaces and St Marks Square...I should have but it was never clearly painted for me, I think it was assumed I knew it from photographs, but that should not be assumed by an author. Nor were the people he discussed well "painted " verbally. Overall, though I stayed with it, a disappointment.

This book obviously generates the whole spectrum of reactions. Having not read Midnight, I came to it with no expectations. The attraction for me was Venice. I have been reading a lot about Italy lately, and no other book has been anything like this.

I found Berendt's writing style extremely easy to read and very descriptive. I was really caught up in every little story he told, and his characters are some of the most memorable I have ever encountered - and they are real people! In many ways Venice is like a theme park. It is hard to believe people really live there. So I was fascinated to read about some current and previous residents of Venice. It was also interesting that so many people who presume to treat Venice as their own are actually expats or even foreigners.

In short, I loved it and would read it again. I felt that I was getting insight into "the real Venice," or at least one of its guises.

I noticed with this book that I often make comparisons to previous books that I have read. At first I was concerned that I do this, but after contemplating it more I have come to the conclusion that I have to have some type of base to work from. In the Olympics the subjective sports usually give lower scores to the first person performing so that they setup their base for future performers. Well this performer was based on the previous work by Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Where Midnight read at times like a mystery, The City of Falling Angels feels more like a grouping of short stories with a splatter of lawyer/trial thrown in. The book still does a great job of describing the real sense of Venice and its people. It makes me want to go and see the city and the Fenice just as I was able to visit Savannah.