Customer Reviews

Venetian Stories

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

You may find John Berendt's (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) fascinating book of Venice today, The City of Falling Angels, a good place to look for an answer to the question.

Along with many other extraordinary stories of people and incidents proving truth stranger than fiction, Berendt's book includes interesting and detailed interviews with many Venetians and others regarding Jane Rylands. These interviews imply that Rylands over many years sought out and befriendly influential expatriates living in Venice who (a) were aged and may need care and, in the latter two cases were approaching senility, (b) had no relatives nearby to care for them on a regular basis, and (c) had valuable assets. These included, in order, former ambassador Sir Ashley Clarke, whose value was introductions to the English-speaking community of Venice; the famous eccentric Peggy Guggenheim; and Ezra Pound's long time mistress, Olga Rudge, mother of Pound's daughter and owner of the invaluable lifetime collection of Pound's correspondence.

The term used to describe Rylands by one person in Berendt's book was "selective gerontophile". The allegations of Rylands's diligent ingratiation with each of the above and her subsequent alleged actions as laid out in multiple interviews in Berendt's book are far more fascinating than her own book. Whether the implications in the comments reported by many who knew Rylands are true or not is for the reader to judge.

Jane Turner Rylands focuses each of this set of stories on a single Venetian resident, most of whom are of some patrician class, and most of whom know each other. A naive reader might easily be left with the impression that half of Venice bears a title like Contessa, three-quarters of Venice is obsessed with the minutiae of social life (who gets invited to what party), and all of Venice are snobs. Admittedly, Rylands throws in a spare worker or two - the sort whom she might have met when they were fixing up her palazzo - but clearly her heart belongs elsewhere.

The result is dishy and gossipy, and so fun enough if Venetian gossip is what you're looking for, but I wouldn't even exactly call them stories. Rylands is more interested in describing the people than in narrative or plot. There's something a bit off-putting about her writing style, too; everyone speaks in the same mannered, arch tone as the narrator. Rylands commands her milieu but not her craft. Mi dispiace, this was a disappointment.

I loved this book as I love any well constructed window into a foreign land, and the real venice, the living Venice--that of postmen, gondoliers and socialites is truly foreign. Ms. Rylands captures the details of refinery, squalor, and deceit at play in the most beautiful mudflats, contrasting the decadence of the nobles with the base charm of the lower classes, and weaves a rich and varied story of stories. Having lived in Venice for over a year and a half, I am familiar with many of the quirky bellies of Venetian life which Ms. Rylands depicts.

I enjoyed almost all 12 stories in this book, and I liked how much of them interlock in some way or another. The descriptions of Venice made it come alive, and the different viewpoints encompassed a wide variety of people from a visitor to the city to the mayor. You could really tell that the author wanted you to see that the city's upper-class life was fading in most of the stories. However, I had some problems as well. About three of the stories I didn't really "get". They just seemed to make no sense whatsoever. I also found it odd she only wrote about four women, I had wished for more a balance there. Lastly, I often felt like the author was being condescending to the reader, which was a bit of a turnoff. Alright, but nothing great.

It is puzzling that some reviewers of this book turn to a work of fiction expecting it to serve cowedly as a tourist's handbook or guidebook. Venice is a puzzle, historically, geographically and socially, and Rylands leads her readers through these linked but distinct networks with elegance and assurance, her network of stories interlinking in the manner of the Venetian network of canals - surely, enchantingly, mysteriously, rewardingly. Her learning is deployed with a lightness of touch, yet it is a lightness both lithe and rich. Rylands' stories illuminate Venice; but the book's title suggests that `Stories' is a word as worthy of attention as `Venetian', and these words combined prove to be irresistible - as an artful account of a city's past, present and future.
There is something at once satisfying and delightful about the way in which Rylands' twelve stories are woven one into another - as delightful as the interweaved canals of Venice itself. Characters reappear: the Postman pops into Mason; an oil-can is thrown into Visitor, which also contains the Gondolier. A web, gossamer-thin and thinly-gossiping, is established. The movement between and among stories is one of contraction and expansion: the first story, Postman, is expansive, swelling, packed full of diverging materials, images and ideas. And then this is followed by the contraction, deliciously delayed and delicate, of Architect, the story snapping shut like an old briefcase - having exuded an aroma that lingers over the following stories.
Since Rylands is a short-story writer, with an eye on more than what the tourist expects to find in Venice, there is an accommodating yet unobtrusive attention to interiors, at once played against and chiming with a similarly acute attention to exteriors - the Campos and canals of Venice. There is the less than practical layout of the palazzo in Architect, where the process of shaving demands a journey past the kitchen. Or, during a different journey, there is the first class seat on the plane in Visitor - with the American Visitor's camera around his ankles, various newspapers floating around his knees. And then the Visitor, Charles Smithers, a clash of earned and unearnest hopefulness and resigned hopelessness, gives in to hope.

"They had taken up Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare and Titian. They would take up Charles Smithers. Charles Smithers smiled at the seat back in the row ahead, which was practically prostrate before him."

There, "prostrate" is at once worshipping and squashing: as smilingly willing as Venice both to take up (raise up?) and crush the visitor. But then, how "back" hurts its head on "ahead"; and how cramped that plosively alliterating and spluttering "practically prostrate" is. Slyly second-class.
Venice is allegedly dying, both metaphorically (as a near-moribund museum) and literally (as newspapers report once a month). Against Venice's tourism (ephemeral immigration) and its natives' departures (the mass emigration to the mainland and elsewhere), Rylands plays beautifully and rejuvenatingly a possible renewal, rebirth, regeneration - of Venetian children playing in Campo San Stefano, and clambering up the plastic chairs in its cafes; of older Venetian children returning to Venice.
And yet there is decay - a decay mingling with humour, just as the beauty of a Venetian canal is polluted with litter. There is the pathos-filled Contessa: "You can't live in the past; the children had figured that out". You can't; and yet, in a typical Rylands touch, it is the mother - from the past - of one of these children who has fixed up this particular future. And it also looks forward to Interpreter, who lives triumphantly in the past to bring herself up to the future, to be "modern". Rylands is herself an interpreter and observer of Venetian life, and her stories have the intermingling of satiric, thoughtful analysis and loving description that characterizes only the greatest fiction.

I purchased this book prior to visiting Venice this summer in hopes that it would provide valuable insights about local culture. From that perspective it was a poor investment. The book offers minimal information about local customs, food, folklore or virtually any other aspect of Venetian life. What it did make overwhelmingly clear was that there is a well established party circuit for the rich and famous, but if you fit in those categories you probably already knew that.

What sets the book apart is not so much the focus of the city, but that the writer has an old fashioned writing style that is both refreshing and frustrating at the same time.

Venice is a uniquely beautifully and fascinating city. It's unfortunate that this book provides such a quirky perspective that is of little value to developing a better understanding and appreciation.

I have not read such a witty or elegant book this side of the year 2000. Finally we have a new challenger for the Best Current Short Story Writer crown - Jane Rylands is by turns Jamesian, good-hearted, arch, open-hearted, wicked, withering, knowing, knowledgeable, in love both with Venice and the art with which it is decorated. And described by her: Rylands' own art, never muttering self-indulgently and insufferably to itself, and yet playfully and powerfully vigilant in its own silky self-awareness.