Book of the Month: Venice for Lovers, by Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein
Every city has its own character and appeal, but the character of Venice seems especially alluring. Partly it's because the city is so ethereal, a place of palace, bridge, and dome but especially of water and the kind of weightlessness that shimmering mirror-surface confers. Partly it is the play of grandeur and decay, testament to man's highest ideals and the mortal mutability at their base. And partly it is the separateness of the place—a lagoon-city rustically cut off from the mainland yet home to exquisite art and industry, a place that in its very singularity can feel like a fairy tale or a dream.
All these qualities have attracted writers for centuries, so much so that a 21st-century writer might feel that there is simply nothing new to say. But happily, as Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein illustrate so richly in their new book, Venice for Lovers, if you embrace Venice wholeheartedly, experience it keenly and grow to know it like a lover, La Serenissima will yield new insights and rewards.
Novelist Begley and biographer Muhlstein live in New York, but they have been faithfully visiting Venice for a fortnight every year for the past three decades, and over that time it has become a second home. Their homage to that adopted home is presented as a triptych. In the first part, "The Keys to Venice," Muhlstein takes us into four restaurants that have become their habitual dining rooms and introduces restaurateurs who present a four-cornered collage of the city's history, culinary art, entrepreneurial ambition, and personal warmth. In the second part, "The Only Way to Enter Venice," Begley weaves the tale of a young man who journeys to Venice in pursuit of an older woman—and ends up falling in love with the city instead. In the third part, "Venice: Reflections of a Novelist," Begley expertly unfolds the ways in which three great fiction writers—Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann—have employed the city's inimitable qualities in their work.
This multi-perspective portrait is refreshing and delightful. Begley and Muhlstein manage to combine in one volume the innocent ardor of a first-time visitor and the seasoned appreciation of longtime lovers. Reading their accounts brought me immediately back to my own most recent trip to Venice last spring, when I discovered on Torcello an astonishingly delicious restaurant called Osteria Al Ponte del Diavolo (in a lovingly refurbished 17th-century fisherman's home), and managed once again to get happily lost late at night in Venice itself, wandering into a still-open mask-maker's shop, passing the occasional bar illumined by lamplight and singing, stopping to savor the watery symphony-slap of canal on gondola, and wondering what century I had stumbled into—exhilarated to know that Venice offers undiscovered treasures still.
