By the Grand Canal

Following the end of World War I, a British diplomat decides not to return to his sham marriage in London and stays instead in Venice, where he lives among his Italian friends and explores the vagaries of his own heart.

The lapping waters of the canals of Venice transport readers to 1920s Italy in this quiet, richly atmospheric novel by Rivière (Kate Caterina, etc.). In the aftermath of WWI, British diplomat Hugh Thurne arrives in Venice fresh from the armistice talks. Old family friends Giacomo and Valentina Venier open their crumbling palazzo to him, and soon the lanky man whom friends call "the heron" is involved in a number of romantic dramas that distract him from the cares of war and from his marital troubles brewing back in England. He revels in an affair with passionate Emanuela, an opera singer, but life becomes more complicated when his best friend's widow, Violet, arrives in Venice having lost her husband in the fighting. And soon Hugh's long respite watching the shadows reflected upon the waters of the Grand Canal ends with a heartbreaking journey to the graveyards of San Michele to bury yet another of his dearest friends. Rivière's flair for transposing the finest nuances of gesture and mood to the page lends his novels an extra layer of texture, and here he successfully captures the now-vanished habits of a decaying city. Played in a decidedly minor key, this is a lovely rhapsody of Venice and a stirring philosophical examination of war and its aftermath.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The author of Kate Caterina (2002) chose the perfect setting, post-World War I Venice, to capture the moods of exhaustion, hope, and fear of the unknown that enveloped Europe in 1919. The crumbling city itself is the true protagonist of the novel, which centers somewhat on Hugh Thurne, a British diplomat who has more or less abandoned his family in England. Thurne is by far the most animated of the characters as he travels back and forth to Paris during the peace talks. Clearly, though, his heart belongs among the rundown palazzi and brackish canals. His friends, the Venier family, represent both the degraded, almost dying city and, in the younger generation, the will to survive, to reanimate the city and rejuvenate its unique beauty. The novel is not so much plot driven as it is mood oriented. Riviere delves deeply into the characters' feelings and their sometimes conflicting rationalizations. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved