Review
A love letter to an ancient Italian city by the sea . . . Both writers are exemplars of the windowpane school of prose: We are able to visualize their subjects as soon as we take in their sentences.”Mindy Aloff, The Washington Post
Refreshing and delightful. Begley and Muhlstein manage to combine in one volume the innocent ardor of a first-time visitor and the seasoned appreciation of longtime lovers.”Don George, National Geographic Traveler
This is an unconventional introduction that captures the spirit both of La Serenissima and of what Thomas Mann called the slightly foul odor of sea and swamp.”. . . fresh insights both from the writers who are quoted and the authors themselves: and the novella is a gem.”Andrew Taylor, Times Literary Supplement (UK)
A charming collection of writing and memoirs of the most romantic of cities.”The Daily Express (UK)
About the Author
Born in Poland in 1933, Louis Begley is the author of many novels, including Wartime Lies, About Schmidt and Shipwreck. His wife of thirty years, biographer Anka Muhlstein is the author of La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier and, most recently, A Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine. They live in New York.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Mindy Aloff These little volumes, mirror images in several ways, make exquisite companions for the armchair traveler who dreams in the languages of literature and art. Each book is a love letter to an ancient Italian city by the sea: Venice, on Italy's upper thigh, and Naples, about two thirds of the way down its shin. Both are also billets doux to the marriages of their authors, each couple containing one biographer (Anka Muhlstein, Francis Steegmuller) and one novelist who worked for years in a nonliterary profession (Louis Begley, a lawyer, and Shirley Hazzard, a staffer for a decade at the United Nations). In both books, the authors write about a place they know well from having lived there intermittently over decades, with, in each case, New York as their other home. Finally, each book is a compilation of previously published and newly minted writing. Venice for Lovers is built around a lecture about the way the city figures in the fiction of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Begley himself. Begley delivered this piece in 2002 at a benefit for Save Venice, an organization dedicated to the preservation of the city's architectural treasures. Muhlstein contributed a personal essay that focuses on the couple's friends among the city's restaurateurs, which permits her a discussion of the devastating flood in 1966. Begley added a new short story, set in Venice, about the romance of frustrated lust, and the couple collaborated on a preface that explains the circumstances in which the book came to be. Both writers are exemplars of the windowpane school of prose: We are able to visualize their subjects as soon as we take in their sentences. The Ancient Shore -- less gregarious and yet more comforting, oddly, in its long-range views and aristocratic reserve -- collects several impeccably constructed essays (first published in U.S. magazines and newspapers) about the history, architecture, geography and volcanoes of Naples. Hazzard's elegant and ruminative prose is offset by Steegmuller's muscular account of being brutally mugged in the Piazza San Francesco and of the humane medical treatment he received in two rather impoverished Neapolitan hospitals. The page-turning tension of his storytelling serves as a reminder that Steegmuller, who died in 1994, was a devotee of Flaubert and also published several detective novels under the pseudonym David Keith. One or two small, new essays and a handful of magisterial photographs of Naples -- by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Herbert List, Bruno Barbey and David Alan Harvey -- complete the volume. These books enlarge the imagination while they satisfy the hunger to learn about a place: how it feels to walk its streets and encounter its people, how its buildings from different eras look in the light at various hours, how memories and book learning can affect the way one perceives a tower or alleyway. By temperament, I incline toward the understated appreciations of art and people I find in The Ancient Shore, although many readers will take delight in the life and energy, as well as the connoisseurship and -- here and there -- disdain that pepper Venice for Lovers. And I'm probably alone in questioning a point that Begley makes about Proust: that the first lesson to be learned when one character obsessively torments and manipulates another out of jealousy, resulting in the severance of the pair, is that "the extinction of love is tragically simple: we change as time passes." Sometimes, it can be salutary to distance oneself from the dark sides of the great masters and seek lightheartedness in the living, as when Muhlstein describes two exhausted men after the '66 flood roasting bass the tide had washed up and proclaiming it the best they had ever tasted. Or when Hazzard writes that "those of us who first came to Italy in the 1950s were more than lucky: we were blessed. . . . We were surprised by pleasure. . . . The impressions that poured over us in those years and our own readiness to be pleased can never be mocked or repudiated." Such passages, simple as they are, constitute the unalloyed traces of love.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Take two well-known writers, novelist Louis Begley and his biographer wife, Anka Muhlstein, give them two decades of summer writing in Venice, add their passion for food and skillful observations about local color, and you've got the makings for great listening. The promise is fulfilled with Malcolm Hillgartner's facile pronunciations, his ease in uniting three short pieces of different genres, and his liveliness, which will capture listeners whether they've experienced the magic of Venice or not. The production's wide variety includes Muhlstein's enticing descriptions of four Venetian restaurants and the owners who seduced the pair of appreciative diners; Begley's nonfiction accounts of Venice's power over Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann; and Begley's novella about a young man who parlays unrequited sex into an ardor for Venice. S.W. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
