Review: The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

After thinking about books so much this weekend, I've decided to do a short review of the one I've just finished, The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt. I'm a fan of his previous work, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and, coincidentally, I've recently been reading a lot of fiction set in the beautiful city of Venice. When I saw this creative non-fiction offering, I was excited to read this author's take on the town and its obscure local customs and inhabitants.

Having been to Venice briefly myself, I already had a handle on the main attractions and locations, but I still learned a lot from Berendt's detailed descriptions and his insider insights. He depicts the everyday lives of the locals in great detail, describing the less traveled canals and tourist-free, working class neighborhoods as well as the tony palazzos inhabited by rich foreigners and the crumbling remnants of the Italian nobility.

The people in this book are indeed larger than life characters, but none of them are fictional. Berendt gives the reader a peek into the lives of the obscenely wealthy upper class while simultaneously delving into the lives of the day laborers working on and affected by the destruction and reconstruction of the city's grand opera house, the Fenice. The hunt for the cause of the fire is a major linchpin in the story, tying the characters together and allowing the author to rotate in and out of varied vignettes by providing a solid anchor for the storyline arch. Details and facts are concisely spelled out, but the reality of the events is apparent in the loose ends that remain stubbornly, mysteriously untidy to the end.

One detail that the author failed to mention in this meticulous, fact-driven tome is the English translation of the name of the opera house. "Fenice' means 'phoenix', and, as previously mentioned,  the book details the rise of the Fenice from the ashes of the suspicious fire that felled it shortly before Berendt's arrival in Venice. I can't believe he would ignore such an obvious (maybe too obvious?) translation, especially when he does mention the first fire that felled the original theater in the late 18th century, causing the Venetians to rename what had been the San Benedetto Theater. Perhaps this is an innocent oversight; something that would be so obvious to a person fluent in Italian that it might not be deemed worth spelling out in English print.

My favorite part of this book is the lengthy detour into the life and death of the Ezra Pound. Berendt goes on at length about the poet and his mistress, spinning the stranger-than-fiction tale in such an interesting manner that the reader forgets he did not know the man personally. Did you know that for a time during World War II, Pound lived in a remote mountain cabin with both his estranged wife and his longtime mistress? Imagine the dinner table conversations in that tense environment! I never knew how captivating Pound's personal life was, and although the long description in the middle of the book necessitates an abrupt stoppage of the rest of the tale, once the main chunk of Pound's life in Venice is described, the threads of the story of his heirs and affairs is skillfully woven into the rest of the more modern story.

In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading travel stories, histories, creative non-fiction, or even historical fiction. The characters are all well-rounded to the point that it is often difficult to distinguish the people that the author encountered in real life from the ones he has only heard about from second-hand reports. The story does lag at times, but never for long. Like all good travel writing, it sparked my interest in the places described within, and it certainly made me want to revisit Venice as soon as possible!