The Floating Book: A Novel of Venice (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In certain light-suffused mists, Venice deconstructs herself..." (more)
Key Phrases: quick hooks, quick books, little nun, Fra Filippo, Felice Feliciano, Sosia Simeon (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Numerous characters and plot lines spin through this historical romance, but the real star is 15th-century Venice, a "transparent floating book, where the pages are concepts visible in colour. Not a thing of the mind, but a piece of beauty dedicated to the senses alone." Situating historical figures like German printer Wendelin von Speyer alongside over-the-top creations like Sosia Simeon, a Serbian woman with an insatiable sexual appetite, Lovric spins an intrigue-laden tale of destructive lusts and mixed-up loves in the early days of the printing press. She has an eye for sensual detail, conveying the sights and smells of the city's markets and palazzi. But her characters-such as the demagogue priest, Fra Filippo, and his helper, Ianno, who, once cured of a fleshy appendage on his head "resembling a tiny human brain," finds himself "obsessed with doing good where once he committed only badness"-are caricatures. Byzantine plot twists and steamy sex scenes may count for more than subtlety of prose in a standard page-turner, but Lovric's literary aspirations often force the action to take a back seat to heavy-handed references to the Latin poet Catullus and extravagant descriptive passages. In Lovric's Venice, a clumsy lover is "humiliated to the darkest core of his soul," while sexual infatuation is "an exhilarating nightmare like a ride on a seabird's back through the dead hours of the night." Readers looking for a good yarn will get lost in the window dressing, while those seeking a novel of elegance and depth may not feel rewarded enough for their perseverance.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post

The first thing to say about this historical novel set in 15th-century Venice is that you must keep going. It gets better. Indeed, making your way through the early pages is an experience not dissimilar to making your way for the first time through Venice itself: You see the beauty of the architecture, you feel the imminent detail of the history, you sense a certain amorous languor in the air, and you might even glimpse some fleeting sign of real life down a narrow sottoportego as your guide elaborates about the sights ahead -- but the whole experience is forever being hijacked by ubiquitous image-conscious Venetians (particularly the gondola guides) who love themselves and think they are it. And yet, if you are prepared to stay on a while, to allow your guide's amour propre its proper play, to immerse yourself -- then the rewards can be as opulent and ravishing as you first imagined.

So with The Floating Book. Most of the characters soon slip off their stagy silhouettes. The interlinking stories start to pull at you. The fictional letters of the Roman poet Catullus that herald each section begin to have credibility and pertinence. A host of interesting themes declare themselves: You find yourself thinking about the nature of obsession -- the book's first subject -- about witchcraft, about the positioning of the dots of the "i"s on the first printed pages, about Judaism, about the effects of the plague, prostitution, medicine, about whether the point of the printing press was to erase the personality of the scribe the better to let the words speak for themselves or whether the beauty of early printing was actually in the idiosyncrasy of a given type face, about hypocrisy, betrayal, loyalty and disgrace. In short, 15th-century Venice slowly comes alive.

The story is really two stories, although they are always linked. Story one is about the fate of an alluring Jewish girl, Sosia Simeon, married to a good Jewish doctor whom she despises, but loved by (and lover to) many men of all ranks -- in particular the young editor Bruno Uguccione, who adores her even more abjectly than the rest. Sosia herself is a committed sensualist -- she feels everything on the skin and nothing in the heart. The only man she really wants is Felice Feliciano, the great scribe, "whose tawny colouring and perfect features were one of the wonders of Padova." Story two (which I found the more engaging) is about the struggle and rivalries of Wendelin von Speyer, a Rhinelander who has come to Venice to set up a printing press. It is this second story that provides access to the inky world of early print: typefaces, books, poetry, lettering, words.

And words do matter to Michelle Lovric. She is, I think, directly present (brandishing her literary manifesto) when she has Felice write: "This is the true soul of Venice, this bubble city in my dreams. She's like a transparent floating book, where the pages are visible in colour. Not a thing of the mind but a piece of beauty dedicated to the senses alone." But it is only when Lovric devotes herself to the very real business of sentences rather than the seductive daydreams of her overall idea or setting, that she begins to reveal herself as a gifted and individual phrasemaker -- always revealing, never anachronistic, and never, ever lazy. This sentence, for example, captures the impetuousness of Bruno: "He watched the bird tracks fading slowly in the mud with an impatience no one else could understand." Or consider how she conveys the diversionary chatter of von Speyer's jealous wife: Her "lips all through supper snapped open and shut like travelling clams." And my own favorite passage, which describes the moment where Bruno opens the door to Sosia and realizes that the rest of his life will be "an exhilarating nightmare like a ride on a seabird's back through the dead of the night." Perfect.

Add to this writing talent the many other virtues Lovric brings to "The Floating Book" -- a command of her subject that is so intimate that it is almost indecent; a similarly intimate facility with Catullus's poetry, which she translates herself; her thorough and (more important) judicious use of her prodigious research -- and you can begin to see how rewarding The Floating Book can be. In this age of "creative" writing courses, lowest-common-denominator fiction and the staggeringly overrated "art" of the screenplay, it is refreshing and heartening to read a book by a writer who is genuinely interested in words.

Reviewed by Edward Docx

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (February 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060578572
• ISBN-13: 978-0060578572
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #669,799 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not quite up to its potential, but worth reading/good close, March 17, 2004

By	B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Floating Book: A Novel of Venice (Hardcover)

I have to admit that through much of The Floating World, I kept wishing for more. Sometimes more characterization. Sometimes more focus. Sometimes more editing. Sometimes just something more. At times I found it wonderfully written and moving, at times I considered putting it down for good (mostly the middle section), and by the end I was definitely glad I had kept going. But at all those times it never felt it quite matched up to its potential of setting or character. I can see some starting it and never finishing it, but despite its flaws, I'd recommend slogging through whatever tough parts you come across.
There are a lot of strengths to the book. The Venetian setting for one, is beautifully described. But its role goes beyond simple window-dressing. Lovric does an impressive job of making Venice essential to the story, making it almost a character itself in the way that it impresses itself on the people in the book, the way it causes certain actions and reactions. It's a masterful job.
Some of the characterization is also extremely well-done, most particularly the couple at the center of the novel who share part of its narration--the printer Von Speyer and his wife. Watching their marriage through all its highs and lows is at times exhilarating and at others achingly painful. They are the most realized characters and the most effective ones and the book seldom slips when they remain its focus.
Other characters, unfortunately, aren't as strongly composed. Sosia, another major character, starts out strong, but then seems to twist in the wind a bit, stagnating as a character before becoming more and more unlikable. She is one of those missed-potential examples. There are places where her character could be redeemed (as a literary character, not in the moral sense) but those points are either glossed over too quickly and come too late, making them ineffective. In the end, you wanted more from her as a character, wanted to feel more for her. The same is true for several of the minor characters, such as Sosia's husband or Bruno and Felice, two of her (many) lovers. Plot events manipulate you into feeling certain things about their relationships, or at least feeling you should feel something, but the emotions aren't really earned by the writing, mostly because the characters aren't drawn sharply or realistically enough.
The book has some pacing problems I thought. The opening is somewhat slow, but I'm always willing to forgive that in a book of this sort and in fact it picked up not too far into the book. Large parts of the middle third or so, however, gave me serious pause and almost convinced me on several occasions to just give up. The final third, though it maintained some of the book's flaws, moved along more quickly and more movingly, culminating in a strong close.
Structurally, the book moves back and forth in time and narration. There are periodic jumps to letter written from Catullus to his brother detailing his life in Rome, the motivation for/creation of/reaction to his poems (the present-time publication of which is one of the major focuses in the book). The letters are interesting in their own right and the parallels between his time and what is happening in Venice, both in terms of events and characters, quickly become clear. At times, almost too clear and on at least one occasion near the end, I thought one of the past revelations weakened the book's ending rather than enhanced it. Whether you like the use of this structure is probably a matter of personal taste; I found it effective at first and less so as the book went on. In either case, it's easily followed.
The narrative shift is equally clear but much more effective and in contrast to the time shifts, grows more so as the book goes on, adding intimacy and an emotional weight that a third-person narration wouldn't quite achieve.
Overall, the book was disappointing, more in relation to what you felt it could have been. The strengths of the book were so strong that they tended to highlight its weaknesses, so you were left with a lot of "what if" feeling. Still, if they did highlight the weaknesses, those same strengths also made the book, in the end, worth reading. Recommended, but with some sorrow, and with understanding should some not finish it.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Just too much; but still a good read, January 14, 2004

By	Mary Reinert (Nevada, MO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Floating Book: A Novel of Venice (Hardcover)

This could have been an absolutely fantastic historical novel; however, I feel the author attempted to intertwine too many characters and too many plot lines. Bringing the German printing press to Venice provides a great backbone for the plot; however, the switching back and forth to the ancient poet and the sexual escapades of some woman named Clodia is just confusing. I guess the author wanted us to become as enthralled with the erotic poems as the Venetians were; however, for me it just didn't work. The details of the city, the differences in personality between the Venetians and the German printer, the superstitions, and the effect of the printing press are wonderful. In all, very good historical read, but one that I almost abandoned due to excesses -- in wording and in characters. (Sometimes I had to stop to read a sentence over and ask myself "what in the world did that mean?"). The character of Sosia is as one editor described "over the top" while other characters such as von Speyer are easily believable.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Venetian labyrinth: 3 1/2 stars, March 23, 2004

By	Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Floating Book: A Novel of Venice (Hardcover)

Like many historical fiction debuts, Michelle Lovric's The Floating Book suffers from too many facts at the expense of storytelling. Most of the novel takes place in Venice just after the invention of movable type, although each section is framed by correspondence from the Roman poet Catullus to his brother in 63 B.C. Lovric's Venice can be deliciously evil and romantic at once, with murky water that sometimes gives up dead babies and with doors that hide intense passion and curses. Her characters are Venetians and foreigners alike: Sosia, a Serb Jew who seduces men of every class as long as they are Venetians; her husband Rabino, a respected doctor who embraces practical medicine over superstition; Wendelin von Speyer, a German entrepreneur and typesetter; Wendelin's Venetian wife Lussièta who loves him despite, or perhaps because of, his foreignness; Bruno, Wendelin's editor and a man at the mercy of Sosia's indifference; and many others. Catullus and his poetry hover over all as his poetic undying love for his cruel lover (mirrored in the relationship between Bruno and Sosia) becomes the publishing venture the main characters eagerly await. The problem is, with so many characters and so many details obviously drawn from thorough research, nothing gets fully realized. The relationship between Wendelin and his wife shows the most promise, but even that gets bogged down by lengthy explanatory passages. Many of the characters are wooden and seem to exist solely for the purpose of exposing a side of Venice during the time period. The best characters, though - Bruno, Wendelin, Lussièta - made me wish Lovric had concentrated almost exclusively on them. As a character, Sosia holds the greatest promise of being memorable, but Lovric never fully enters her heart, instead leaving her motives for the end when the reader has already lost sympathy.

Despite its flaws, The Floating Book has much to offer. Although the writing alternates between beautifully evocative and stilted/overwritten, the best sections are engrossing and well-paced. The middle of the book is the slowest, and readers might be tempted to skip over whole sections to get to the real stories of interest. But to do so would compromise the resolution, which draws its threads from all the plots. The author has clearly fallen in love with the idea of fifteenth century Venice, and her passion is contagious. But the setting as character is simply not dynamic enough to carry the weight of an entire novel.

I give this novel three and a half stars, an average of the best sections and the worst. Avid readers of historical fiction might find this novel more compelling than I did, especially if they relish an emphasis on history over story.