Review: The City of Falling Angels

For Christmas this year, my overly-generous brother-in-law gave me an IPod Nano. Among other amenities, this handy device has allowed me to indulge my craving for good literature without cutting into the dwindling freetime I have. Using the IPod, I have taken to listening to books on CD while I am driving to school, walking around campus or doing any number of mundane things throughout the day. So while I might fit in with the undergrads, given that I now have plastic appendages coming out of my ears as I walk, I retain my intense "nerdiness" by the fact that I am listening to books. C'est la vie. The following is a review of the a recent book I listened to, namely, The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt. As with previous reviews on this sight, I will refrain from too much analysis as I find that this can tend to persuade a reader to not pick the book up for him or herself, and my goal in these reviews is always to encourage reading.

Berendt is the best selling author of the critically acclaimed Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Though his latest book falls short of his first classic in every sense, he does manage to do for Venice, Italy what he did for Savannah, Georgia in the former work. The city comes alive in Berendt's artful hands and is a character in its own right. Through his artful descriptions, incredible detail and witty anecdotes, the reader finds himself placed in the middle of the city, tasting its foods, smelling its air, and walking its streets (or in this case, traversing its canals). And other than Savannah, Georgia, there is perhaps no other city, Berendt shows, quite as unique as Venice.

Berendt arrived in Venice in January 1996, just a few days after the fire of the city's historic (and last standing) opera house the Fenice. This event, then, serves as the unifying event through which he weaves his tale about the city of Venice as seen through the eyes of its marvelous, real life characters. As in his first novel, every character is real. We meet Venice's plant man, who has dressed as a large plant on the streets of Venice for twenty years selling his exotic shrubbery. We meet the Rat Man of Venice, the man who has given his life to developing the perfect potion for killing rats. We meet master glass blowers, famous poets, artists, and architects. We learn about the Italian family, the haunts of the likes of Henry James and Ezra Pound, and the fate of the American sponsored "Save Venice" program. We experience, through Berendt's eyes, Carnival, the centuries old Venetian tradition of taking to the streets in wild, masked celebration, the likes of which are not rivaled on New Orleans hallowed streets.

Through it all, we learn more and more about the mysterious night the Fenice burns as Berendt skillfully unravels a tale of arson and madness. The reader comes to see the Fenice as a metaphor for Venice herself, a once marvelous and towering city that in its latter years has become tired and old. The canals are dirtying, the history withering, and the architecture literally falling to the streets. Yet Berendt shows its beauty and the reader is left feeling as if he or she has been there.

Berendt, unfortunately, does not bring all of the characters he has introduced to the reader back together around the event of the Fenice burning. This is the fascinating triumph of Midnight, that all of the characters we came to know through the book were ultimately somehow involved in the murder mystery that unified that book. Such is not the case with The City of Falling Angels. Yet Berendt nowhere claims that he meant it to be so. He wanted to tell the story of Venice through the eyes of the people who lived there. And this he did with the same skill his fans have come to expect.