Venetian Stories [Hardcover]

Jane Turner Rylands (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2003

In these twelve wry and fascinating stories Jane Turner Rylands has brilliantly evoked the hidden and day-to-day life of one of Europe’s most mysterious cities. The thoroughly engaging characters who are the focus of these stories are from different backgrounds and various Venetian neighborhoods, but their lives—and the stories—overlap and intersect in surprising and playful ways. We meet such workers as a postman, a gondolier, and a mason; and from a different circle, an architect, the mayor, a visitor (an American decorator), a contessa, a baronessa, and an English lord. There are avenging ghosts, a deceitful husband, and a fiendish mother among these.

Through Rylands’ eyes we observe the amusing quirks and habits of the natives as well as of outsiders who are absorbed into this very closed society with all its rivalries, petty jealousies, and hierarchies. For all its elegance and sophistication, Venice comes to life as a small town. Suddenly, we have a sense of what is happening behind the seemingly inscrutable Gothic façades of those timeworn palazzos lining the Grand Canal.

These stories draw us into a complex, scheming, almost farcical society, but the poignant subtext is the profound fragility of a city with an uncertain future. Jane Turner Rylands has written a book that is as memorable and luminous as Venice itself.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Everything is connected in this clever book of 12 linked stories: islands, people, whole intersecting cultures. An oil can chucked into a canal on page eight whizzes past an ear on page 148, and some of that same oil starts a fire in the last story. Rocco, a Venetian construction foreman in "Mason," thinks of his city as a place whose various parts are connected not only by bridges but by "people at windows looking across canals straight into each other's houses...." One thing bridges to the next; there are no degrees of separation. Yet each of Rylands's dozen stories is fully realized, with its own pace, vocabulary and emotional pitch, the tone of each reflecting the character on center stage: "Postman," "Architect," "Collector," "Contessa," "Mother." The stories break down Venice's famous social barriers by making the reader intimate, for a moment, with the full array of humanity in the enchanted city. Rylands is an Ohio native who has lived in Venice for 30 years and is married to the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. She is perhaps best at describing American and English travelers and transplants. "Visitor," for instance, takes the reader straight inside the word-obsessed brain of Charles Smithers, who can't stop punning, making lists, cleverly arranging quotations; he doesn't speak so much as recite dialogue. Rylands's intricately worked mosaic will please anyone heading to Venice or dreaming of the next visit.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Entry into Venetian society, not only the society of contessas, British nobility, and wealthy American expatriates but also the working-class Venetians who help the city go about its everyday life, is like getting into a vault, and the code is tough to crack. Entry into the society of the true Venice, in the piano nobiles and palazzos along the Grand Canal, far above the tourist shops, is a much coveted thing. In magnificent prose, Rylands enters this society with a series of carefully crafted and intertwined vignettes--there's the mailman with a dirty secret, the contessa who secretly communicates with the dead, the wealthy American who creates a scandalous library, the British lord, and the gondolier (claiming he's the only true Venetian) who rooks his way among tourists and Venetians alike. The reader slowly sees the never-ending circle of gossip, intrigue, and heart-wrenching stories of diminished wealth, uncertainty, and gloom that occurs in a city that will never again be what it once was, in a society that is, perhaps, as polluted as the Grand Canal itself. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (May 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375422323
• ISBN-13: 978-0375422324
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,046,102 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bravo! Encore!, May 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Venetian Stories (Hardcover)

I've been to Venice a few times, and Ms Rylands' book is funny and moving and most of all, gives you a real feel for the city. I think it's really sympathetic to the inhabitants. My favourite has to be the story of the Countess-a woman who is struggling against the collapse of her family and what she perceives to be the slow death of Venice, as tourism ruins life for the local inhabitants, who are leaving for the mainland. Like one of her famous courtesans, her beauty has brought Venice tourism and wealth, but at what cost?

Like all Turner-Rylands' depictions of family life, the outcome of the Countess story is very touching, and definitely optimistic. She clearly has adopted the italian reverence for the family.

...I don't know if these are real people she's based her book on as the Iowa reviewer seems to think (perhaps he/she knows something I don't), but it's to the author's credit that they seem so utterly real. If they are, I'd love to meet them...Venetian Stories certainly made me wanna go back to Venice soon!

21 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Venice was never this boring., October 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Venetian Stories (Hardcover)

I approached this book with great anticipation, having loved Venice my entire adult life, having visited it half a dozen times and having devoured a whole shelf-ful of Venetian novels, stories, poems and travel books--Wings of the Dove, Death in Venice, The Passion, Those Who Walk Away, The Comfort of Strangers, Don't Look Now, Dead Lagoon, Invisible Cities, the mystery novels of Donna Leon, the histories by Jan Morris and J.J. Norwich, and the classic book-length essay by Mary McCarthy. Venice tends to confer a kind of refinement on books about her. But not this time! I found it impossible to get into this book. I kept trying NOT to become bored, hoping it would get better, but alas it did not. The author's narrative voice is grating, arch, full of itself and hollow. She tries for lit'ry effects again and again, but all she achieves is affectation, which is painful to witness, if at times unintentionally hilarious: I mean, what on earth does "evanescence whispered in the walls" mean? Does the author understand the meaning of the word "evanescence?" It would seem not. Rylands betrays herself throughout her book as a posturing novice putting on airs. Stay away at all costs. You can lay your hands on enough real literature about Venice without wasting your time on trash like this.

26 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A missed opportunity..., May 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Venetian Stories (Hardcover)

Jane Turner Rylands has lived in Venice for thirty years and, according to the jacket copy of this collection of short stories, her husband is the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum of modern art. One can assume therefore that Ms. Rylands is fairly well positioned to write a perceptive account of what really happens in Venice. The surprising and disappointing thing is how many of the stories in this book involve unpleasant people stabbing each other in the back and jockeying for social position.
To be fair, Rylands' writing is polished and she can tell a story well. But she has an annoying fatal flaw: it's her irritating condescension, which never lets up. Really talented story-tellers are truly engaged with their characters; Ms. Rylands' haughty tone sets her apart and puts the reader off at the same time. In addition, she often strains for effect with awkward or even downright silly results--as in the book's very first sentence: "When the last quarter of the twentieth century opened throttle for the millennium and the Venice of today...."
Rylands would probably have been better off writing a book of nonfiction about her own life in Venice and the lives of other real people who live there. But then, maybe she did and this is it.