Venises

Morand was in his eighties when he put together this book; I say 'put together' because although there's a chronological framework it seems almost incidental and Venices, whilst being a look back through the years, is a collection of musings as much of as memories-mostly but not altogether of

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Venice--rather than a memoir. Morand touches upon his father's habits, Palladian architecture, his travels, office politics in the diplomatic corps, Venetian history, the way the sunlight falls on a favourite cafe. And because he was reared and for all his life kept a foot in an artistic milieu, the likes of Les Six, Diaghilev, and Proust are some of those who people the book, though a reader shouldn't expect telling anecdotes about the famous.

As he does in the other two books I've read by him, Morand writes with a calm restraint in a style that without being in any way striking makes many others' writing seem tepid and undistinguished. Perhaps it's that calmness that makes his books so attractive--that and, in Venices, an incredibly strong sense of mood. I can't just now think of another book so strongly pervaded by mood. The tone is overwhelmingly elegiac, and long after I finished reading I felt a bit melancholy. It's not that Morand expresses sadness or regret; he's much too urbane for that. (And when he does give way to a things-were-better-when-we-were-young complaint he ends it with 'And the young people of today are better-looking than we were.')

My copy of Venices is from Pushkin and its very appealing cover has a murky painting of a Venetian scene on a textured blue background, but Pushkin has also issued another edition with a quite horrid cover that looks like a wallpaper sample from the 1950's; if you're ordering this online, it might be worth checking to see which version you'd be getting.

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