by Nancy Pearl
VENI, VIDI, VENICE
From what I can recall, my first introduction to the city of Venice was in Betsy and the Great World, one of the -A- Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. Since I so strongly identified with Betsy, I felt as though there was no need for me to go since Betsy experienced it all for me. (And she fell in love with the devastatingly handsome Marco, besides, although she never forgot Joe Willard. What can I say, you have to be eleven and read it yourself.)
Over the years I’ve read other books—both fiction and narrative nonfiction—that did make me want to visit that most unusual of cities. Probably the best book to read about the history of Venice as seen through its art and architecture is Mary McCarthy’s Venice Observed. Despite its age (it was originally published in 1956), it’s still in print and still valuable reading for any trip to the city.
One of the books that explores contemporary Venice, and sketches the city’s descent from world-leadership status in the fifteenth century to its (sad to say, relatively) minor place in the world today (that is, minor except in the hearts of Venetians and those who love the city dearly), is John Berendt’s The City of Falling Angels. He arrived for an extended visit right after the magnificent opera house, La Fenice, was destroyed by fire in 1996. One of the things that struck me about this chatty and appealing book, besides the wonderful descriptions of people from all walks of life whom Berendt meets and talks to, is how beautiful he makes the city sound despite its bureaucratic nightmares and dangers of being overrun by tourists or destroyed by erosion from the Adriatic Sea. Here’s a quote I find especially evocative about the lure of Venice:To me Venice was not merely beautiful; it was beautiful everywhere. On one occasion I set about testing this notion by concocting a game called “photo roulette,” the object of which was to walk around the city taking photographs at unplanned moments—whenever a church bell rang or at every sighting of a dog or cat—to see how often, standing at an arbitrary spot one would be confronted by a view of exceptional beauty. The answer: almost always.
No plans for a trip to Venice would be complete without reading the series of mysteries by American Donna Leon, all of which feature Commissario Guido Brunetti; the first, published in 1992, is Death at La Fenice. One of the pleasures of reading Leon is getting to know Brunetti’s family and co-workers, as well as the mouthwatering descriptions of food and drink. (The first time I drank prosecco, the sparkling wine of Italy, was after reading about it in this series.) For walkers (and Brunetti fans) like me, it’s fun to dream of replicating the strolls described in Brunetti’s Venice: Walks Through Venice with the City’s Best-Loved Detective by Toni Sepeda (with an introduction by Donna Leon).
Louis Begley and Anka Muhlstein, longtime married, spend two weeks a year writing in Venice. Venice for Lovers is an account, in each author’s voice, of their passion for the city; in addition, there’s a charming novella by Begley about the experience of a young man who falls in love with a place and a person.
And that maven of manners, Judith Martin—Miss Manners herself—is also aVenetophile, as can be seen quite clearly in her No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice.
The best parts of Deborah Weisgall’s novel The World Before Her describe the experiences of two very different women in Venice. One is a thirty-three-year-old American sculptor named Caroline. The other, sixty-one-year-old Marian Evans, is the very real nineteenth-century English novelist better known by her pen name, George Eliot. Alternating chapters, many set in Venice, move from 1880 (Marian’s tale) to 1980 (Caroline’s story) and back again.
Experiencing Venice through each of your senses is the goal of native Venetian Tiziano Scarpa’s Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide.
Other contemporary novels I’ve enjoyed that take place in that watery wonderland include Kathryn Walker’s A Stopover in Venice; the fabulous mystery Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell; and Salley Vickers’s Miss Garnet’s Angel.
Among the many Venetian-set historical novels, you won’t want to miss Sarah Dunant’s In the Company of the Courtesan; the novels of Dorothy Dunnett, in which Venice has a central role—especially, but not exclusively, Scales of Gold, part four of the House of Niccolo series; and the third in a series of historical mysteries by Jason Goodwin, The Bellini Card. And after reading it (in Venice, preferably) you could stop and have a Bellini in the shadow of the Rialto Bridge, as one of the fans of this book told me she did.
VERONA
Verona’s probably best known as the location of two of Shakespeare’s plays: Romeo and Juliet and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. But it turns out that, bookwise at least, it’s a swell place to spend a vacation. Tim Parks’s Italian Neighbors: Or a Lapsed Anglo-Saxon in Verona and An Italian Education: The Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona are delightful memoirs. Parks also wrote A Season with Verona: Travels Around Italy in Search of Illusion, National Character and . . . Goals!, about his obsession with the Verona soccer team. Those who admire irony with a definite bite will enjoy Parks’s novel set in Verona, Juggling the Stars.
In his captivating mystery, Death in Verona, Roy Harley Lewis takes a fresh (fictional) look at the lives of the characters in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, especially Lady Capulet.
VIENNA
Whether it’s described in fiction, biography, or history, Vienna has a storied aura about it, as can be readily seen by the books suggested here. Three histories of Vienna that offer outstanding general background on the country’s place in the world order are Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture; Frederic Morton’s Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914; and Paul Hofmann’s The Viennese: Splendor, Twilight, and Exile.All are well worth a read.
Frank Tallis’s novels provide almost a contemporary guide to early twentieth-century Vienna, and they’re awfully good mysteries, too. Start with A Death in Vienna, in which he introduces his protagonists, Detective Oskar Rheinhardt and his good friend, Max Liebermann, a physician and follower of Sigmund Freud. The cases continue in Vienna Blood, Fatal Lies, and Vienna Secrets.
J. Sydney Jones’s The Empty Mirror is set in the last years of the nineteenth century; the painter Gustav Klimt is a suspect in a series of murders. The (fictional) lawyer Karl Werthen works with the (real) criminologist Hanns Gross to find the killer. It’s followed by Requiem in Vienna.
Probably the most important novel about pre-World War I Vienna is Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. Clark Thayer, a friend from Tulsa, suggested that I read this—it was one of his favorite novels. It was a formidably challenging read for me, but I grew to appreciate its modernist intricacies and comic tone. There’s a new-ish translation by Sophie Wilkins, which wasn’t available when I read Musil’s grand novel early in the 1980s. I wish I could tell Clark how much I enjoyed it, but alas, we lost touch years ago.
For a more contemporary picture of the city, try the very weird but wonderful novel—or collection of interlinked and (somewhat) autobiographical stories—The System of Vienna: From Heaven Street to Earth Mound Square by Gert Jonke. This is a perfect book for anyone who is interested in playful language and doesn’t demand reality from the plots of novels.
Because I love both history and many memoirs, I was quite taken with Marjorie Perloff’s memoir The Vienna Paradox, in which she looks at pre-World War II Vienna in the light of her family’s experiences.
Among all the other famous people that were born or lived in Vienna, the Wittgenstein family is one of the best known. Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War traces the experiences of its ill-fated members.
Other novels with a Viennese setting include Philip Kerr’s A German Requiem; Graham Greene’s The Third Man (also a terrific movie, maybe one of the few that’s better than the book itself); The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey (Gustav Klimt is one of the main characters); Sarah Gainham’s Night Falls on the City and its sequel, A Place in the Country; The House of Widows by Askold Melnyczuk (only partially set in Vienna, but it’s such a st
rong and vivid novel that I felt I needed to include it here); John Irving’s Setting Free the Bears (his first novel, but one that has all the themes so well developed in his later books); Mary Stewart’s Airs Above the Ground, which is not, strictly speaking, set in Vienna, but rather in the Spanish Riding School in Austria (but surely belongs in this section); and the romantic and satisfying Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson.
VIETNAM
Books about Vietnam vary from nonfiction (political analyses and histories) of all approaches, sizes, and opinions, to fiction, which also comes in all approaches, sizes, and opinions. I included a section on Vietnam in Book Lust, so you might want to begin there. Here are the books I’ve been most moved by and impressed with recently.
Vietnam veteran Homer R. Steedly Jr. killed a North Vietnamese soldier at point-blank range in 1969 and took an illustrated diary from the dead man. More than three decades later, Steedly decides to find the family of the man he killed and give them back the diary. Fellow veteran Wayne Karlin, who served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam during the war, tells Steedly’s story in Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam. Karlin is also the author of Marble Mountain, a novel in which Kiet Hallam, daughter of an African American soldier and Vietnamese mother and adopted as a child by Americans, tries to discover who her parents were.As with all of Karlin’s books, the underlying theme of both of these is forgiveness and reconciliation with the past.
If you’re looking for an all-consuming read about what it was like to take part in the Vietnam War, you won’t do better than Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War. I found this tale of a young Marine named Waino Mellas and his fellow Bravo Company soldiers to be forceful, disturbing, and distressing: I didn’t want to stop reading but was forced to pause every three or four pages to breathe deeply and try to recapture my emotional equilibrium.
A friend of mine who recently took a bicycle trip in Vietnam told me that The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family by Duong Van Mai Elliott was the most enlightening nonfiction she read about the country. The subtitle practically says it all, except it doesn’t give a hint about how quickly and thoroughly engaged you become as you read this emotionally resonant memoir and family history.
Others to check out are Christian G. Appy’s Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides, an oral history of the war; Dana Sachs’s utterly charming The House on Dream Street (one of the lighter reads in this section); Doug Anderson’s memoir Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery; They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 by David Maraniss, an hour-by-hour account of a ferocious battle in Vietnam and an antiwar protest against Dow Chemical Company; David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (don’t miss reading this one); James Webb’s powerful novel Fields of Fire; and The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli, which is, quite simply, a spectacularly wonderful novel. I also highly recommended Tim O’Brien’s novels set in Vietnam: The Things They Carried, In the Lake of the Woods, and Going After Cacciato.
In addition, Curbstone Press publishes a series called Voices from Vietnam, which brings the works of Vietnamese authors to American readers.
WALES WELCOMES YOU
The book you absolutely must read before journeying to Wales is How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. The story of Huw Morgan’s coming of age in a small Welsh mining town is one of those books that I wish I could read again for the first time—it’s the same way I feel about Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, which is set in a totally different part of the world entirely.
And then can you move on to these:
Jan Morris’s A Writer’s House in Wales is distinguished by her keen eye for detail, her fine writing, and her enthusiasm for her subject. It’s mostly a memoir, but also includes a good deal of Welsh history and culture packed into a short (168 pages) book.
Judy Corbett and her partner, Peter Welford (a bookbinder and architectural historian), discovered the dilapidated Gwydir Castle in Northern Wales and decided—impulsively—to buy it and restore it to its former glorious state. Corbett writes about their experiences in Castles in the Air: The Restoration Adventures of Two Young Optimists and a Crumbling Old Mansion.And there’s even a ghost from the seventeenth century. Travelers to Wales can stay at the restored castle, now operating as a B&B.
No book lover will be able to resist the myriad charms of all of Paul Collins’s books, and perhaps especially those of Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books. In it, Collins describes the period in which he; his wife, Jennifer; and his young son, Morgan, lived in Hay-on-Wye, known as the Welsh “town of books.”Woven in with the stories of houses they tried to buy and his part-time job in the biggest used bookstore in town are captivating accounts of books Collins discovers, as well as ruminations on book titles, the vagaries of publishing, literary hoaxes, and the fate of many unsung writers through the centuries whose books never made the splash they deserved.
Others not to miss include Horatio Clare’s Running for the Hills: Growing Up on My Mother’s Sheep Farm in Wales, which is both lovely and loving; Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (anything by Chatwin is worth reading; this novel is no exception); Kathryn Davis’s novel The Walking Tour;Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom; Susan Fletcher’s Whitbread Award-winning poetic debut novel, Eve Green; and Owen Sheers’s Resistance (an alternate history centering on a German invasion of the country during World War II—it’s an unforgettable novel).
And mystery fans won’t want to miss Rhys Bowen’s mystery novels featuring Constable Evan Evans. Evans Above is the first one, but they don’t really need to be read in order. Canadian author Elizabeth J. Duncan sets her cozies in Wales. She won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery competition for The Cold Light of Mourning, so begin with that, and then reach for its sequel, A Brush with Death.
WALK RIGHT IN
There are WALKERS and then there are walkers. The uppercase variety long to traverse a country by foot, or navigate the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, or walk from one end of Manhattan to the other. The lowercase walkers, while otherwise certainly eminently honorable and pleasant people, have no such ambitions. They are fine with travel by trains, planes, automobiles, bicycles, horses, and camels. WALKERS feel that ambulating gets them to the heart of a place in the way no other mode of transportation can do. I aspire to join their ranks (although I fear I may have left it too late). I find that walking clears my mind, lifts my spirits, and allows me to see the world from a slower, more considered perspective. On top of all that, walking provides good exercise—talk about multitasking!
A perfect place to begin reading about walking is with Geoff Nicholson’s delectably idiosyncratic The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism . (Thanks to Nicholson, I now refer to falling as “a disagreement with gravity.”) You’ll discover all sorts of odd tidbits of information (useful when confronted with any awkward lulls in conversations), including: Farsi has nine synonyms for walking, while Norwegian has over fifty; the idea of Velcro came to its inventor during a walk; in 1809 a British gentleman named Robert Barclay Allardice walked one mile an hour for a thousand hours in a row and won one thousand guineas as a result; and much, much more.
A stately, wide-ranging study of the history, philosophy, and literature of walking is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust. Until I read this, I never knew that Thomas Hobbes (author of Leviathan and coiner of the phrase “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” to describe the life of man) had a special walking stick with an inkhorn at the top so he could jot down anything of importance that occurred to him as he was out on one of his peregrinations. Solnit’s book also has a lovely series of quotations—from Virginia Wolff to Ivan Illich—running along the bottom of every page. Or it might be more fitting to say, walking along the bottom of every page.
Here are some entertaining, sometimes quirky, and often stirring acc
ounts of individual (long) walks.
Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America explores the life of an indomitable woman. In the 1890s Helga, a mother of eight children, and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Clara, walked from Spokane, Washington, to New York City in order to win a $10,000 prize and thereby save their family farm. The consequences of her journey affected her relationship with her husband, her children, and her community, all of which Linda Lawrence Hunt explores in this moving tale.
In the first week of September 2001,Tom Fremantle began following in the footsteps of Colonel Arthur Fremantle (a cousin of sorts), who traveled from the Mexico-Texas border up to New York during the summer of 1863—getting rides on stagecoaches, railroads, and riverboats. Tom decided to walk the whole way, accompanied only by a seventeen-year-old mule named Browny, and describes his trip in The Moonshine Mule.
Miles Away:A Walk Across France by Miles Morland describes the month he and his wife—neophyte long-distance walkers—spent trekking by foot from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.Their story is amusing, self-deprecating, and, above all, inspiring; I can sort of imagine shouldering a backpack and following in their footsteps.
In early 1990, as the Cold War ended and cataclysmic changes were occurring all over Eastern Europe, Jason Goodwin and two friends decided to walk from Poland through Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria all the way to Istanbul and see how people were responding to political events along the way.The result, On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul, is a book that meshes armchair travel and the history of a region into a substantial yet inviting read.
And, of course, don’t forget these classics: Eric Newby’s ironically titled A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush; Henry David Thoreau’s Walking (far less well known than Walden); and Peter Jenkins’s A Walk Across America.
