Reading Venice

VENICE-O-METER 3

Novel mostly set in Venice.

‘I’d give something to meet that lady.’

Gwinnett did not sound hopeful. Dr Brightman and I assured him there should be no difficulty in arranging that.

‘You’ve just got to sit in the Piazza [San Marco] long enough. You see everyone in the world, if you do that.’

Running into people is something of a habit for Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator of Anthony Powell’s sprawling social epic A Dance to the Music of Time, of which Temporary Kings is the 11th novel (and the second novel in Volume 4). And it’s certainly something he does a lot in Venice, where he’s spending a few days on the occasion of a conference — he crosses paths, more or less felicitously, with some of the usual suspects from the series, including Ken Widmerpool and Odo Stevens.

The hotel where Jenkins stays isn’t identifiable (a comparably modest place on the Grand Canal), whereas other places are explicitly named, including that ever-lasting favorite of fictional characters and real tourists alike, Florian’s. With his superb and characteristic lack of sentimentality, the narrator doesn’t bother to wax lyrical about Venice, but he does regale us with a warts-and-all description of the Piazzale Roma:

Ennui and dejection were to be associated with the small hours spent in that place. Even in daytime the Piazzale Roma, flanked by two garages of megalomaniac dimension, overspread with parked charabancs and trucks, crowded throughout the twenty-four hours with touts and loiterers, is a gloomy, dusty, untidy, rather sinister spot. These backblocks, raw underside of the incredible inviolate aqueous city, were no doubt regarded by Tokenhouse as the ‘real Venice’ — though one lot of human beings and their habitations cannot be less or more ‘real’ than another — purlieus that, in Casanova’s day, would have teemed with swindlers, thieves, whores, pimps, police spies, flavours probably not wholly absent today.

You can find all the places I could idenitfy on the Reading Venice map.

The highlight of the Jenkins’s stay in arguably his inspection of a fresco by Tiepolo depicting the myth of Candaules and Gyges, in the Palazzo Bragadin. The fresco does not exist, as Richard Rosenbaum and Barry Pelzner point out on their website Pictures in Powell. This rooting of fantasy in sharply defined reality seems typical of Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time series.

A big thank you to Brad from Neglected Books for bringing Temporary Kings to my attention.