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The City of Falling Angels

By John Berendt

(7)

| Hardcover | 9781594200588

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 reContinue

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.

2 Reviews

  • 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

Book Details

  • Rating:
    (7)
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  • English Books
  • Hardcover 414 Pages
  • ISBN-10: 1594200580
  • ISBN-13: 9781594200588
  • Publisher: The Penguin Press
  • Pub date: Sep 27, 2005
  • Dimensions: 24 cm x 14 cm x 4 cm Just how big is that?
  • Also available as: Paperback, Audio CD and Audio Cassette
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ISBN Edition List Sale Seller
9781594200588 Hardcover $25.95 -- Amazon US
£15.75 -- Amazon UK
$36.00 -- Amazon CA
¥3305.00 ¥2976.00 Amazon JP
€20.36 €20.36 Amazon FR
-- €22.65 Amazon DE
$25.95 $20.76 bn.com
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+ 3 copies tradable: 1 in USA →

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