Watermark - Hardcover

Brodsky, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374148120 ISBN 13: 9780374148126

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1992

Synopsis

A collection of forty-eight essays on Venice explores the city's meandering, waterlogged streets, stunningly beautiful architecture, atmospheric characters, and unique spirit. By the author of Less Than One.

About this title

Reviews

As much a brooding self-portrait as a lyric description of Venice, poet Brodsky's quirky, impressionistic essay describes his 17-year romance with a city of dreamlike beauty that banishes nightmares. Praising Venice and its architecture as a triumph of the visual, the Nobel laureate uses his visits there as a touchstone to meditate on life's unpredictability, the appetite for beauty, death, myth and modern art "whose poverty alone makes it prophetic." Waxing confessional, he declares, "I am not a moral man. . . . I am but a nervous man . . . but I am observant" and offers autobiographical asides about his youthful lust for an Italian communist scholar and a 1977 meeting in Venice with Susan Sontag. In his wayward forays amid canals, streets and cathedrals barnacled with saints, the eternal Venice shimmers through the fog, battered yet resplendent.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A very, very short prose-exercise by Nobelist Brodsky about Venice, his many wintertime trips there, the enchantment and ironies and visual splendors. Brodsky has piquant ideas about space and time (see Less Than One, 1986) that lend interesting angles to his Venice-for-visitors: ideas about water, light, brick (``an alternative order of flesh, not raw of course, but scarlet and made up of small, identical cells. Yet another of the species' self-portraits at the elemental level, be it a wall or a chimney''). He finds himself one evening in the company of Olga Rudge, Ezra Pound's companion, which engenders a wonderfully European assessment of Pound: ``For someone with such a long record of residence in Italy, it was odd that he hadn't recognized that beauty can't be targeted, that it is always a by-product of other, often very ordinary pursuits.'' Brodsky writes poetically of winter light: ``And the city lingers in it, savoring its touch, the caress of the infinity whence it came. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.'' When he's setting up to make aphorisms like this, Brodsky sails along. But even in such a tiny book he can't always be doing that; and when he isn't, he writes personally, with an air of swagger, lechery, and disdain (for homosexuals in particular, it seems) that makes his meditations seem more crotchety than anything else: Venice gets lost in the fog. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Nobel laureate's latest book is a paean to Venice, "itself a work of art," which has welcomed him for 17 winters of reflection and discovery. Brodsky views his adopted city not as a tourist but with the keen eye of a poet, finding beauty (a recurring theme) in the juxtaposition of lacy Venetian facades with "the anarchy of water." After this, he writes, "Everything is a letdown." Moving lightly in its imagery from a string of pearls to the Milky Way, Watermark pays tribute in language worthy of this great city. Its irresistible style and grace combine to express a dream that afterward lingers like a treasured memory. Very highly recommended.
- Paul E. Hutchison, Bellefonte, Pa.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374148120
• ISBN 13: 9780374148126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 135