The City of Falling Angels

Summary (from the publisher): The author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil returns after more than a decade to give us an intimate look at the "magic, mystery, and decadence" of the city of Venice and its inhabitants

It was seven years ago that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil achieved a record-breaking four-year run on The New York Times bestseller list. John Berendt's inimitable brand of nonfiction brought the dark mystique of Savannah so startlingly to life for millions of people that tourism to Savannah increased by 46 percent. It is Berendt and only Berendt who can capture Venice-a city of masks, a city of riddles, where the narrow, meandering passageways form a giant maze, confounding all who have not grown up wandering into its depths. Venice, a city steeped in a thousand years of history, art and architecture, teeters in precarious balance between endurance and decay. Its architectural treasures crumble--foundations shift, marble ornaments fall--even as efforts to preserve them are underway. The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996, when a dramatic fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house. The loss of the Fenice, where five of Verdi's operas premiered, is a catastrophe for Venetians. Arriving in Venice three days after the fire, Berendt becomes a kind of detective-inquiring into the nature of life in this remarkable museum-city-while gradually revealing the truth about the fire. In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters: a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking "suicide" prompts his skeptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own; the first family of American expatriates that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership; an organization of high-society, partygoing Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, while quarreling in public among themselves, questioning one another's motives and drawing startled Venetians into the fray; a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and outrageous provocateur; the master glassblower of Venice; and numerous others-stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, believers in Martians, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James.

Review: The source of the title of this book, a sign posted outside the Santa Maria della Salute Church in the early 1970s, before restoration of its marble ornaments, warning passerby to "beware of falling angels" is particularly apt to sum up this book.  Venice is both mysterious and poetic, a place where history is, quite literally, crumbling around you. Berendt opens his book in the aftermath of the tragic fire that destroyed the famous Fenice theater of Venice. Berendt decides to set up shop and investigate and write about both the potential sources of the fire, and the bureaucratic nightmare of undertaking its restoration. 

Just as in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Berendt has a captivating writing style that feels conspiratorial - he relays gossip, uncovers decades' old feuds, unravels the complexities behind one seemingly simple act. I enjoy his almost detective-like writing and the way he spotlights individuals and slowly reveals their history in relation to a particular place. However, in both books, Berendt creates this idea that he's selecting cities (Savnnah, Georgia in the first, Venice, Italy in this one) that have cultures and histories that are so rich and complex, they are almost impossible to navigate if you were not born and raised within it. Yet over the course of his writing, he does navigate said cities, revealing this complexity to be at least somewhat contrived. Both Savannah and Venice are undeniably unique, culturally rich and diverse, and littered with complicated relationships. Yet I can't help feeling that Berendt's emphasis on the complexity of a place - rather than complexity of all human interactions - is somewhat overstated. 

I loved the opening to this book and felt it had great promise. The image of the glassblower, Archimede Seguso, the twenty-first generation master glassmaker in his family, watching the Fenice burn from his bedroom window and then recreating the image of fire in his glass, is captivating and lyrical. Indeed, I enjoyed many of the segues into individual's history in Venice, including that of the Palazzo Barbaro and the section on Ezra Pound and his mistress, who lived in Venice for many years. Yet little if any of it was connected together. The book does begin and end with the Fenice, and many chapters are devoted to the investigation and the drama with the Save Venice organization raising money to restore it. Yet overall, the novel felt like sections pieced together with only Venice in common. Throughout, I kept thinking all the stories would eventually come together as related in some way, but that did not occur. In particular, Berendt spent significant time on the sketchy theft of Ezra Pound's letters through the contrived Ezra Pound Foundation and the drawn out ordeal of Mario Stefani's heir. Neither of these had any significance in relation to either the Fenice or each other.

While I do not think this book quite lived up to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it did give me a great sense of Venice culture, and not the Venice seen by tourists. Berendt takes his reader as close to an inside look at Venice society and history as you can go without moving there yourself. 

Stars: 3