Name: Venices
ISBN: 9781901285413

Paul Morand

Venices

Emmett

I look on that world of yesteryear without resentment, nor regret; quite simply, it no longer exists; for me, at least, since it continues, without any bother or fuss, in a universe that is a little more brutal, a little more doomed, and in which the average level of virtues and vice must have remained more or less constant. It is merely that its ways are no longer mine [...] there's nothing left for me to do down here except make way; I shall never accustom myself to electronic gadgetry, nor to living in a country whose fate is being determined six thousand kilometers from where I live. Everything sets one's teeth on edge in this world where it is always rush hour and where children want to be Einsteins;

Throughout History, Venice has shown two faces: sometimes a pond, sometimes the open sea, one moment peddling lethargy in bookshop windows, the next exploding into a far-flung imperialism'

That black little canal; at the far end, at the very top of the perspective, there is a house of a dull red colour; as the sun goes down, its beams suddenly alight on the façade and illuminate it just as one lights a candle.
Water lends a depth to the sounds, a silky retentiveness that can last for over a minute; it is as if one was sinking into the depths.

This reader, having but a fraction of Morand's education and none of his worldly experience, can only half comprehend the splendour that gilds his prose, but even if understood only in part, it fully fascinates. The writing reflects the author - cultured, elegant in thought, musing but not rambling, exhibiting a control that is not imposed but learned, permeating. This book is part 'sketch' of a place and part autobiography. Moving from a dignified past to the years of World War Two to finally face an unexpected and uncertain present, details Venice not just as a place, but as an experience. His observations of the city unfold in sensory, personal, aesthetic, and historical dimensions, and attesting to the cultivated mind behind their conception, there are no strict boundaries between these 'types' of reflections. The memory of witnessing the auctioning of an art collection ('April 1964, Crazy Bidding') provokes a Proust quotation, the history of the Palazzo Labia, the venue of the auction, appears casually, and, between the suggested disconnection between art and the market (or rather, the incomprehension that these two wildly different concepts would ever meet, and that they do, any hope of reassuring reconciliation) lurks something like sadness:

'Beneath M.R.'s ivory hammer, an entire art-lover's world would vanish; artefacts have no master. Only the Tiepolos would remain, their fate bound to that of the walls of the empty building. [...] Above them was the throng of goddesses, painted as permanent frescoes, and who were now mistresses of a deserted Palazzo Labia, laughing for all eternity, like the Rhinemaidens. Detached from their supports, in whose arms would these beautiful women now lie? Where would these Bacchuses parade their drunkenness, or these Ceres their harvests?'

The dignity of this passage belongs to the lament. Although Morand at other instances is quick to assume indifference, that loss seeps through. It leaves one wondering whether such insouciance is dignified concealment - which is probably the best.