Grove Koger
A couple of weeks ago I described three fictional works set in Venice, one apiece from Thomas Mann, Frederick Rolfe, and L.P. Hartley. Today I’m taking up three later works—a long story, a novel, and a shorter novel, each of them written from a different point of view. Every writer, it seems, and perhaps every visitor, discovers a different Venice.
Daphne du Maurier: “Don’t Look Now,” in Not after Midnight and Other Stories, 1971
Grieving the recent death of their daughter, John and Laura are vacationing in Venice when they encounter two aging sisters, one of whom is blind. Laura is assured by the blind sister, who is also (or pretends to be) psychic, that their daughter is actually sitting beside them and is happy. Laura takes the statement to heart, but John refuses to believe the woman, and grows doubly frustrated when the psychic passes on a message from the daughter that the couple are in danger if they remain in the city.
Like most of the other stories by du Maurier that I’ve read, “Don’t Look Now” suffers from overplotting, but the masterful 1973 film adaptation directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie prunes away the inessentials.
Muriel Spark: Territorial Rights, 1979
Scottish novelist Spark spins a frantic black comedy from the interactions of a group of louche characters whose lives intersect in Venice, from expatriate murderers to connivers, adulterers, and private detectives. The book reaches back to the intrigues of World War II to what is, in the 1970s, the present day. Much of the action is set in the Hotel Byron, a reference to the famous poet who visited the city in the early nineteenth century. There are questions not only about motive and opportunity but also about the ownership of the truth and the past, with seemingly everything up for grabs.
As a contemporary once said of Byron, he was “bad, mad and dangerous to know,” and that estimation sums up the atmosphere of Territorial Rights. I had the opportunity to review it in Library Journal before its publication, and wrote that at its conclusion, “Spark grasps the rope out of which she has tied her cunning knot, snaps the ends, and lo! the knot vanishes.”
Susan Hill: The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story, 2007
The author of the popular Woman in Black (1983) constructs this old-fashioned but frightening short novel around a “dark and unattractive” eighteenth-century painting of a Venetian carnival scene. Cambridge don Theo Parmitter buys the painting at auction, but despite having bid on impulse, he refuses to sell it in turn to the aging Lady Hawdon, who’s desperately anxious to have it for herself. The story behind that desperation makes up the principal thread of this dark work, but the painting’s malignity eventually spreads like acid to touch all of its characters.
The painting you see at the top of today’s post is The Molo: Looking West (1730), by Canaletto, while the one at the bottom is Venice at Night (1874) by John Joseph Enneking.
□□□
If you’ve enjoyed today’s post, please share!
World Enough 