Venetian Vespers
A Novel
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4.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A NEW YORKER RECOMMENDED BOOK • IRISH BESTSELLER
“A stylish escapade that even Henry James might relish." —Wall Street Journal
A masterful, enthralling new novel from the Booker Prize winner
Everything was a puzzle, everything a trap set to mystify and hinder me. . . .
1899. As the new century approaches, struggling English writer Evelyn Dolman—a hack, by his own description—marries Laura Rensselaer, daughter of an American oil tycoon. Evelyn anticipates that he and Laura will inherit a substantial fortune and lead a comfortable, settled life. But his hopes are dashed when a mysterious rift between Laura and her father, just before the patriarch’s death, leads to her disinheritance.
The unhappy newlyweds travel to Venice to celebrate the New Year at the Palazzo Dioscuri, ancestral home of the charming but treacherous Count Barbarigo. From their first moments in the mist-blanketed floating city, otherworldly occurrences begin to accumulate. Evelyn’s already jangled nerves fray further. Where has Laura disappeared to? How to explain the increasingly sinister circumstances closing around him? Could he be losing his mind?
Venetian Vespers is a haunting, atmospheric novel from one of the most sophisticated stylists of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An English writer and his secretive bride make a fateful visit to Italy in Banville's eerie latest (after The Drowned). By the time Evelyn Dolman meets American heiress Laura Rensselaer in 1899, he has abandoned his dreams of becoming a "lord of language," and instead made a career writing cheap travel guides. After he proposes to Evelyn, they have sex and she proves to be "no stranger to the night-world where Eros reigns." Her oil baron father, Willard, dies shortly after the wedding, and Laura, refusing to explain why he left her little of his fortune, insists on a belated winter honeymoon in Venice. Dolman, who speaks no Italian, is miserable from the cold and from Laura's refusal to have sex with him since their first and only time. She urges him to visit a café popular with tourists, where he meets a stranger named Freddie FitzHerbert, who claims to be his former schoolmate, and Freddie's alluring sister, Francesca. Dolman returns home drunk and rapes Laura, then wakes to find that she's vanished. As the Italian police organize a search, Dolman, unworried for Laura's safety, begins an affair with Francesca. Banville sustains a sinister atmosphere in the strange and subtle narrative, and he keeps the reader guessing as to what degree Evelyn is the victim of others' machinations. This ambiguous tale will linger in readers' minds.
