Venetian Masters, Under the Skin of the City of Love

Venetian Masters, Under the Skin of the City of Love

Venice is, of course, a small place, and the venerable old lido has been gone over again and again by writers of every kind not simply because it’s such a staggering invention but because, as Bidisha recounts, it is all but impossible not to fall in love with the place.

And so it is a great relief to find a book that means to get under the skin of the city, to uncover a side of life inaccessible to the tourist or the traveller (the snobbish distinction is traditionally made by the latter, including the author).

In Venetian Masters, Bidisha delivers not so much a travelogue as a caught-in-the-act portrait of the city’s inhabitants.
Having spent several months living amidst the Venetian high society, the resolution is beautifully high, layers of detail laid on top of one another to profound cumulative effect. 
The writing, as one might expect from such a well-recognised young talent, is original, succinct and powerful, juxtaposing the clichés with images as unforgettable as they are accurate: ‘the curve of a railing, the scroll of white around a doorway, everywhere something lovely and forgotten’ is an observation any one of us might pat ourselves on the back for appreciating, but I doubt such a number of us would feel the flagstones under our bare feet and imagine we were treading on the warm curves of as many human backs.

As with all the best travel writing, there’s an immediacy to Venetian Masters, a verisimilitude to the dialogue that may owe a great deal to the diaries from which it is compiled. 
Sadly, though, that’s where the similarities with the best travel writing come to an abrupt and permanent end.  In fact, recognising how the writing might, ahem, coruscate like dawn coming to the Grand Canal, it is really quite remarkable how difficult it is to resist using the book to prop up that wobbly table in the kitchen.

There is, contrary to the puff on the back, not a single light-hearted moment, not one ounce of charm on any of the 320 pages.
Every chapter compounds the feeling that you’ve somehow strayed into one of those formulaic stories from an Observer colour supplement documenting one woman’s struggle with an underlying message of hope rather than a few leisurely months  punctuated regularly with prosecco and almond pastries.

‘I don’t like markets for political reasons.’
‘Why?’ [asks the author’s friend]
‘I told you, they make me feel like a housewife.’

If we ignore the ridiculousness of this comment, and if we’re kind enough to overlook the pretentiousness of the statement or the implication that this is at least the second time she’s made it, if we somehow gloss over the tediousness of the opinion, we must at least recognise that one is only going to be made to feel like a housewife if one allows oneself to feel like a housewife.

Again and again Bidisha’s considerable command of language isn’t used to increase our understanding of Venice but far more often to increase our understanding of Bidisha. 
Male mosquitoes sit on the walls motionless until they die ‘like a terrible existentialist allegory’; the churches are monuments to dead white males, the weight of their stones crushing the historical contributions of women out of existence; an art fair is not so much an art fair as a pillar of ‘male white Western capitalist hegemony’.

For every one of these insights into Venetian society, for every carefully framed illustration of its institutional racism, xenophobia and chauvinism, there are two passages detailing the colour of the author’s trousers on a particular day, and three opportunities for the author’s friends to tell her how beautiful and accomplished she is and how much they like her clothes.

During one dinner blessed with the presence of the author, the assembled company is forced to endure the righteous carping of another guest.
Bidisha tells us that ‘I listen respectfully for the first sentence, politely for the next, peevishly for the third, and tend to my own thoughts thereafter.’ 
My reaction to the book as a whole was identical, but I’m perfectly happy to admit that I’d never have expressed it so well.

James Pryor



Venetian Masters: Under the Skin of the City of Love by Bidisha (Summersdale, 2008) RRP:£7.99 (p/b) available in bookstores.

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