VENICE-O-METER 9
Tragicomic short story set in Venice
Unlike in du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now,” whose exquisitely detailed Venetian topography was what led me to start this website, “Ganymede” sticks to well-trodden locations in Venice (the Lido, the piazza San Marco — see Reading Venice Map for details.). Even the name of the protagonist’s (fictional) accommodation, the Hotel Byron, sounds like a tourist trap.
It makes sense, because the story is very much about subverting travel literature clichés. The protagonist, for all his scholarly knowledge and faith in his own superiority, is merely a tourist on a corny “eat-pray-love” mission — he actively fantasizes about a romantic and intellectual Italian experience but, little by little, things go off track. And they end up going very, very wrong. I see it as a brilliant, engaging critique of Mann’s Death in Venice, a novella I’m not very fond of.
“Ganymede” is a cruel story, one that opens wide an ugly abyss in the space that lays between the stories we tell ourselves (about ourselves, about our vacation destinations, etc.) and reality, but it’s also genuinely laugh out loud funny.
Reading Venice 