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The City of Falling Angels

By John Berendt

(23)

| Hardcover | 9781594200588

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Book Description

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 Venice 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.

Critics

'The City of Falling Angels' by John Berendt

The initial few chapters start well, setting up the story of Berendt's arrival in town and his decision to stay and find out what had caused the Fenice fire. The opening chapters are highly personal, introducing the reader to a strange, amusing and s ... (read full critics)

readingmatters published on Mon, 27 Sep 2010

Dirt in Venice

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt 342pp, Sceptre, £20 "Guess what!" cried Dodie Rosencrans, clasping Countess Emo's wrist. The wide-eyed San Francisco socialite and movie-theatre heiress had just returned from a week on the Dalmatian coast. ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

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4 Reviews

This book seemed to cover more of the characters of Venice than what actually happened to the historic Fenice Opera House. Venice is a very intriguing city with many problems not visible to the tourists that spend a few days there. The book does cover a little bit of what happened to the theater b ... (continue)

This book seemed to cover more of the characters of Venice than what actually happened to the historic Fenice Opera House. Venice is a very intriguing city with many problems not visible to the tourists that spend a few days there. The book does cover a little bit of what happened to the theater but there never seems to be any resolution to the bigger problems affecting Venice and in a greater sense Italy. Things don't get done unless you go through endless layers of bureaucracy and of course knowing people and having connections seem like the only way to accomplish things. Of course the rich, connected people never seem to be found guilty of crimes either. Of the many characters in this book there only seems to be one hero, Mayor Paolo Costa. In the end Fenice was rebuilt and reopened but nothing else in Venice was fixed. On a personal sidenote, the reopening of la Fenice was on the same weekend that me and my wife first visited the city together.

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Stcin10 said on Oct 6, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

This book is about Venetians. Each chapter is a tale of one eccentric charactor in Venice, with the background at the fire of the historic opera house Fenice.
While the book isn't so bad, but I think it is really over praised. The chapters are irrelevant to one another, and most of them have n ... (continue)

This book is about Venetians. Each chapter is a tale of one eccentric charactor in Venice, with the background at the fire of the historic opera house Fenice.
While the book isn't so bad, but I think it is really over praised. The chapters are irrelevant to one another, and most of them have nothing to do with Fenice either.

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material girl said on Apr 8, 2009 | Add your feedback

REading history without realizing you are doing it!!

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Tatiana Shafer said on Sep 10, 2008 | Add your feedback

Reading The Corrections

Having read John Behrendt's excellent Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and its explorations of Savannah, Georgia, I was curious to see what direction he might take with Venice. While the book starts off with a conflagration as the Fenice opera house burns to the ground, it quickly goes off in ... (continue)

Having read John Behrendt's excellent Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and its explorations of Savannah, Georgia, I was curious to see what direction he might take with Venice. While the book starts off with a conflagration as the Fenice opera house burns to the ground, it quickly goes off in a variety of other directions. Behrendt has a keen eye for the unusual and the quirky, and he covers a number of such personalities in detail. Most fascinating are the elder craftsman of Murano glass and his family's battles, a gentleman whose specialty is the creation of perfect rat poison, a tragically sad (but gregarious) poet and several American expatriates. Most of all, though, the story of how the woman left behind when Ezra Pound passed away found herself bedazzled and possibly grifted by a couple who gave every appearance of helping her was utterly captivating. There are a few moments where Behrendt gets a bit repetitive, but since each chapter reads as its own vignette, the stories that get multiple mentions are excusable.

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moogle said on Mar 28, 2007 | 2 feedbacks