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The City of Falling Angels by: John Berendt List Price: £20.00 Price: £0.80 You Save: £19.20 (96%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Hardcover EAN: 9780340824986 ISBN: 0340824980 Label: Sceptre Manufacturer: Sceptre Number Of Pages: 384 Publication Date: September 26, 2005 Publisher: Sceptre Release Date: September 26, 2005 Studio: Sceptre Sales Rank: 108490 Related Items:
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Customer Reviews
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 Rating:  - too many outsiders not enough venetiansI had wanted to read this book for a long time as I enjoy anything relating to Venice and its history however I was a little disappointed. Although it comes vividly alive when the author meets real Venetians too much time and too many pages are taken up with 'outsiders' the boring section about the controversial Ezra Pound Foundation lent little to the book and seemed never ending---what did it have to do with the Fenice fire ??? It served only to pad out the midddle section of the book. The interesting account of the Seguso glass blowers family split was dangled temptingly then dropped,it would have been interesting to have discovered more. If anything it proved what a poisoned chalice Venice is-forced to suffer the overbearing American 'art ... Read More: Rating:  - Great Expectations Not FulfilledI know what I expected from a new book by Berendt. I expected something better than the last. I realize now that it was a lot to expect. The City of Falling Angels does not come up to the standard set by his previous novel. It's not that Venice does not compare to Savannah (I am in no position to tell not having visited the latter), it is just that The City doesn't have a decent story to keep the book together. Similarities are quite striking - in both books the narrator arrives within days of a crime being commited. In The City it is the fire of the Fenice, Venice's opera. You're not thrilled? Well, it isn't exactly a crime in which the finding of the guilty would keep you reading through the night. The book traces the opera's reconstruction ... Read More: Rating: - Limited sympathy for small-town gossipI found this on a second-hand stall one Saturday morning a few weeks ago. The unique qualities of Venice have fascinated millions of people for hundreds of years, and though we think we keep rediscovering it, it's something of a cliche to say that nothing new can be said about the place (as Berendt acknowledges, with reference to Venetian authorities Mary McCarthy and Henry James, early on in this book). Here, Berendt tries to tell the story not of the place, but of some of the people he encountered after he moved there there immediately following the 1996 fire that destroyed the Fenice opera house. Part of the story is taken up with the investigation of the fire, and with a few other tales such as the fate of the Ezra Pound foundation and the Save Venice ... Read More: Rating: - Social climbing in VeniceAuthor John Berendt hunts down some of the biggest social climbers on the lagoon. Arriving in Venice just as the Fenice opera house goes up in flames, Berendt creeps around the fringes of the event asking if it was the electricians or the Mafia that caused the historic old building to go up like so much tinder in February 1996. Each year more and more Venetians move away from the island to make a home to find work away from the hordes of tourist that flush through the city's alleyways and squares in much the same way the waters of the lagoon sluice through the waterways. But Berendt does not want to speak about the struggles of the gondolier or the shopkeeper facing ever increasing rents as Disney and McDonalds flex their muscles. He has more highly ... Read More: Rating:  - Another beauty from Berendt"Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" was such a worthy contribution to the non-fiction genre presided over by Capote's "In Cold Blood" that I cannot now explain why I was so luke-warm about the news of Berendt's latest work. I think I was put off because I thought "The City of Falling Angels" would be something of an art history of Venice. I was also wary about the fact it had been ten years' in production. The same is true of "Something Happened", Joseph Heller's second novel. And, in Heller's case, the fact that the book had been assembled so painstakingly letter-by-letter over such a long period really showed to the detriment of the prose. I accept that, with such a low level of expectation, I was hardly likely to be disappointed, ... Read More: |
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