Venetian Stories

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.

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 emigr

I love this book and have given it to at least a dozen people. All the curiosity you feel when you visit Venice about what goes on inside the houses and what it feels like to live in Venice is fed by these stories and yet the appetite is insatiable and you can never get enough--partly because the themes are so touching and universal. I hope that the author will provide more of these stories in the same polished style.

Having read the whole book, I am delighted to find a potpourri of tales, something for everyone. The detail is enough for the mind's eye and ear to make it believe it is the proverbial fly on the wall. One story takes an Italian historical incident and rephrases it into a fictional story, illuminating a human frailty that most of us would secretly understand but hopefully not undertake. Others of these short stories show Freudian and Skinnerian insight into the mind and motives of mothers, rich relatives, aristocrats, and politicians; all topped with O'Henry-esque endings. Reading it was like eating and savoring spoonfuls of a sinfully delicious trifle. One knows one must stop eating, but maybe just a tidbit more, Please? Dave

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!