A Stopover in Venice, per its blurb, should have had everything I enjoy in a novel: a woman rediscovering herself as her marriage winds down; a sojourn in Venice, one of my favorite cities; and art and art history. It ended up being a mixed bag.
It was a difficult read because the usual visual clues that facilitate reading are missing. There are no scene breaks, and as there is a double space between every paragraph (at least in the Kindle version), the reader wanders into a new scene with no advance warning and has to backtrack to figure out what’s going on. The same with conversations. As there are no quotation marks, paragraphs frequently contain description, character reactions, etc. that may/may not be part of the conversation, so the reader again must backtrack to figure out what’s going on. Also, conversations between the main character, Cornelia, and her soon-to-be ex, Antony, are cringeworthy in their banality. Everyone has had such conversations, but that doesn’t mean readers want to read: Gotta go. Take care. Okay. Bye. The novel also bounces around in POV, even diving into the POV of a very minor character, the translator of the quattrocento journal entries.
That said, I did enjoy the arty parts of the story with the reveal of Giorgione and his love, herself an artist, though the “mystery” part was somewhat blatant. Parts of the story are told in fragments of this lover’s journal. Fortunately, these sections are set apart with dates, otherwise the reader would be totally confused switching from the Renaissance to the present day without warning, especially since there is little difference in the voices of Cornelia and Giorgione’s quattrocento lover.
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A Stopover in Venice (Anchor, August 19, 2008) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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