Venice for Lovers (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Anka Muhlstein (Author)
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For decades, biographer Muhlstein (Letters from Russia) and her husband, novelist Begley (Matters of Honor), have traveled to Venice to spend their summers writing. This evocative collaboration—three short works, which together celebrate their beloved home away from home—translates the original, German edition released in 2004. In the first section, an essay, Muhlstein reflects on how they came to know the city through its people, in spite of the couple's strict, self-imposed rules against making friends during their sabbaticals. Their guides were the owners of the four charming restaurants that became their staples. Particularly memorable is Muhlstein's passage about Ernesto, who describes the devastating flood of November 1966. In the second section, a novella by Begley, the reader encounters Venice from the perspective of an American college student who travels there in pursuit of an older woman. She soon rejects him; however, in romance's stead, a deeper, more lasting affection for Venice and a friendship with a classmate develop. In the third section, Begley writes a treatise on Venice's role in the works of three authors he admires: Henry James, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. This triptych of works draws on the best of both worlds: the dazzled, fresh eyes of a pilgrim and the insight of a perennial resident. This book works less as a straightforward guide to piazzas and palazzos than as a stimulant to travels real and imaginary. (Nov.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Mindy Aloff These little volumes, mirror images in several ways, make exquisite companions for the armchair traveler who dreams in the languages of literature and art. Each book is a love letter to an ancient Italian city by the sea: Venice, on Italy's upper thigh, and Naples, about two thirds of the way down its shin. Both are also billets doux to the marriages of their authors, each couple containing one biographer (Anka Muhlstein, Francis Steegmuller) and one novelist who worked for years in a nonliterary profession (Louis Begley, a lawyer, and Shirley Hazzard, a staffer for a decade at the United Nations). In both books, the authors write about a place they know well from having lived there intermittently over decades, with, in each case, New York as their other home. Finally, each book is a compilation of previously published and newly minted writing. Venice for Lovers is built around a lecture about the way the city figures in the fiction of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Begley himself. Begley delivered this piece in 2002 at a benefit for Save Venice, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the city's architectural treasures. Muhlstein contributed a personal essay that focuses on the couple's friends among the city's restaurateurs, which permits her a discussion of the devastating flood in 1966. Begley added a new short story, set in Venice, about the romance of frustrated lust, and the couple collaborated on a preface that explains the circumstances in which the book came to be. Both writers are exemplars of the windowpane school of prose: We are able to visualize their subjects as soon as we take in their sentences. The Ancient Shore -- less gregarious and yet more comforting, oddly, in its long-range views and aristocratic reserve -- collects several impeccably constructed essays (first published in U.S. magazines and newspapers) about the history, architecture, geography and volcanoes of Naples. Hazzard's elegant and ruminative prose is offset by Steegmuller's muscular account of being brutally mugged in the Piazza San Francesco and of the humane medical treatment he received in two rather impoverished Neapolitan hospitals. The page-turning tension of his storytelling serves as a reminder that Steegmuller, who died in 1994, was a devotee of Flaubert and also published several detective novels under the pseudonym David Keith. One or two small, new essays and a handful of magisterial photographs of Naples -- by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Herbert List, Bruno Barbey and David Alan Harvey -- complete the volume. These books enlarge the imagination while they satisfy the hunger to learn about a place: how it feels to walk its streets and encounter its people, how its buildings from different eras look in the light at various hours, how memories and book learning can affect the way one perceives a tower or alleyway. By temperament, I incline toward the understated appreciations of art and people I find in The Ancient Shore, although many readers will take delight in the life and energy, as well as the connoisseurship and -- here and there -- disdain that pepper Venice for Lovers. And I'm probably alone in questioning a point that Begley makes about Proust: that the first lesson to be learned when one character obsessively torments and manipulates another out of jealousy, resulting in the severance of the pair, is that "the extinction of love is tragically simple: we change as time passes." Sometimes, it can be salutary to distance oneself from the dark sides of the great masters and seek lightheartedness in the living, as when Muhlstein describes two exhausted men after the '66 flood roasting bass the tide had washed up and proclaiming it the best they had ever tasted. Or when Hazzard writes that "those of us who first came to Italy in the 1950s were more than lucky: we were blessed. . . . We were surprised by pleasure. . . . The impressions that poured over us in those years and our own readiness to be pleased can never be mocked or repudiated." Such passages, simple as they are, constitute the unalloyed traces of love.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (November 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802118755
• ISBN-13: 978-0802118752
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #933,602 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars LOVE ITALIAN STYLE, November 5, 2008

By	Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

This review is from: Venice for Lovers (Audio CD)

Looking for a good romantic story quite unlike those you've read and heard before? Here it is. Venice for Lovers reveals not only the love shared by a man and woman but also their mutual love for a place, one of the world's most beautiful, storied cities - Venice. Where better to evoke feelings of love and passion?

Working together (to my knowledge for the first time) noted novelist Louis Begley and his biographer wife, Anka Muhlstein, have penned a meritorious story. Add to this a stunning, finely nuanced reading by Malcolm Hillgartner and the result is an audiobook to dream on.

For the past 30 years Begley and his wife have spent their summers in Venice. They go there to write and have pretty much established a rigorous writing schedule for themselves. For one thing, they avoid social occasions. Thus, when she describes Venice it is much as seen through the eyes of the owners of restaurants where they repeatedly dine. Few listeners will forget Ernesto and his memories of the dreadful 1966 flood.

When it is Begley's turn he offers Venice through the eyes of a young man who comes to the city hoping to win an older woman with whom he has fallen in love. She spurns him but as it often is with youth there is more for him to discover.

Those who have been to Venice will welcome this opportunity to revisit it, and those who have not may well begin packing their bags.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dash those great expectations, December 11, 2008

By	K. Doak "esprit d'escalier" (Concord, NH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Any book about Venice attracts me. Without reading the one other review, I have to say that the publisher who told Begley he had the kernel of a book (after reading paper he, Begley, presented at a Venice preservation symposium)may not have gotten what he hoped for.
First, high marks for the first vignette about food and the chefs by his French wife ( and for the translator.) They should have had her write the whole book. While smacking of one-upmanship [really, how many of us have spent the last twenty years spending a month every year in Venice at a hotel (even a small hotel,) eating most of our meals at certain eating places {some grand, others modest} and developing personal relationships with the owners and or maitre d's?,] it was, nevertheless fun. As a food lover as well as Venice lover, it worked for me , no little of which was due to the nice writing style.

The second piece, a short story by Begley, crashes on the shore. A big let down after the first gem. Perhaps it is in tune with the times - a la some (The) New Yorker prose these days, but it wouldn't or shouldn't win Second Prize in the Prima Short Story Contest. Stoopid.

Then the last (third) piece [from his talk, one presumes.] It just seemed rather pointless or at best a stretch. Sure, three great writers used Venice as a backdrop in their stories, but it seems unlikely that a doctoral dissertion advisor would ever encourage his charge to consider this a serious project. It's more a throw away junket that might appeal to the gathering at the "Save Venice" or whatever group he addressed. Boring? Perhaps. Interesting? Not to this reader.

Bring on some more stories, books by the wife!!!