This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
Venice is a city so globally famous that even those who have never been there tend to hold opinions about it. In my experience, those are frequently negative: It’s too expensive, too hot, too crowded with tourists. Calling it overrated has almost become a cliché; people love to remind one another that it’s sinking—fast. At the same time, few places have had as strong, or as enduring, a hold on the artistic imagination. John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, and Isabella Stewart Gardner, among many others, have long been inspired by Venice’s rich cultural history and captivating views.
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Henry James was part of that group. He visited Venice 10 times between 1869 and 1907, and made it the setting of his 1888 novella The Aspern Papers, which was serialized in The Atlantic. The book’s narrator goes to Italy on a hunt for letters by the late poet Jeffrey Aspern to a former lover, Juliana, which he believes the now-elderly lady has secreted away in her palazzo. This year, we sent Anne Applebaum on a related quest: She showed up in Italy searching for the city James got to know—the Venice that inspired a substantial part of his work.
James’s Venice doesn’t dwell among oppressive crowds and opulent halls; it lurks in deserted squares, on less-traveled islands, and within cool, dark churches that hold Renaissance masterpieces. Venice was already becoming a tourist hot spot when James was alive, but he gloried in another city, and that city still exists. Even now, “if you take an odd turn down a narrow pathway and head away from the main attractions,” Applebaum writes, “the crowds thin out, and eventually you can find yourself quite alone.” James wrote appealingly about exploring the city’s “campos—the little squares formed about every church—some of them most sunnily desolate, the most grass-grown, the most cheerfully sad little reliquaries of a splendid past that you can imagine.”
Applebaum’s trip helped me think of Venice differently. She enjoyed the same “perfect light” on the island of Torcello that James saw, the same gold mosaic that covers one wall of the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta; she even walked through the same palazzo on which James modeled the one in The Aspern Papers. She stood on the balcony of the Palazzo Barbaro, another house where James frequently stayed, looking out at the Grand Canal just as the author did almost 150 years ago. If you know where to look, she argues, and if you take the time to do so, the old Venice is always there.
Henry James’s Venice Is Still Here
By Anne Applebaum
In James’s The Aspern Papers, an American uses “duplicity” to access a palazzo. Fortunately, there are easier ways to discover the writer’s beloved Venice.
What to Read
Rum Punch, by Elmore Leonard
This novel is so packed with plot that Quentin Tarantino adapted it into the extra-long film Jackie Brown, in 1997. If you’ve seen the movie, you might imagine Pam Grier sauntering across the page, but this is a breakneck novel in its own right: Characters make and shatter alliances at dizzying speed, and nobody’s motives are ever quite what they seem. A middle-aged flight attendant, Jackie Burke, finds herself trapped between the FBI and an ambitious gunrunner when she gets caught moving his merchandise across international borders. Shoot-outs, sting operations, and boatloads of blow: This book has it all. It’s a terrific beach read, but it has enough substance to keep you sustained no matter where you pick it up. — M. L. Rio
From our list: Eight plot-heavy books that will keep you turning pages
Out Soon
Departure(s), by Julian Barnes
Nothing Random, by Gayle Feldman
The Score, by C. Thi Nguyen
Your Weekend Read
A Daring New Take on Shakespeare’s Most Famous Soliloquy
By Shirley Li
The “To be, or not to be” soliloquy sets a particularly tricky trap. On-screen, the speech’s prestige can overwhelm its existential subject matter, and the passage tends to get overacted. “Because it’s a beautiful speech,” Peter Kirwan, a professor of Shakespeare and performance at Mary Baldwin University, told me, “the beauty of the speech kind of takes away from what it actually means for someone to be working through this.” The fact that any soliloquy halts dramatic action also poses a challenge. Onstage, an actor can naturally hold an audience’s attention, being in the same physical venue. Cinema’s visual language, though, has the potential to undermine the words’ meaning. The sentiment can become a spectacle more than an interior reflection made exterior.
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