Books: Venice the Menaced

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Then again, maybe it didn't need one. In Angels, half the citizens of Venice seem to be acting out roles of one sort or another all day. Berendt's Venice is Savannah with gondolas, a world-class center of civic shenanigans, full of hidden agendas and local rivalries, where any ordinary conversation might be a web of stratagems. As in Midnight, Berendt is not just an urbane guide to a city's secrets. He's also a state-of-the-art weirdo magnet. His book is populated with characters like the wealthy American expatriate who has turned his portion of the family palace into the "Earth liaison station of the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars." There's also the enlightening Rat Man of Treviso, who makes rat poisons customized to suit the appetite of rodents in different culinary zones. He adds pork fat in Germany, popcorn and granola in the U.S. "Rats are better fed than ever," he explains to Berendt. "Because there's more garbage than ever. So they've become very choosy about what they eat."

While he was researching and writing this book, Berendt visited Venice repeatedly, living in a rented apartment and always traveling with a notebook and tape recorder. Angels opens with a note to readers promising that "all the people in it are real" and that "there are no composite characters." He's still sensitive about the controversy that broke out when it emerged that in Midnight he had invented dialogue, fabricated scenes and changed chronologies--fiddling that moved the Pulitzer Prize jury, which was considering Midnight for the award, to rule it out. For this book, he says, to re-create scenes he did not witness, he interviewed all the participants. Some conversations are placed in new settings, but none, he insists, were invented. "I did a lot of research," he says. "You see just the tip of the iceberg." And anyway, in a city as fantastical as Venice, who needs make-believe?