THE MIDWIFE OF VENICE BY ROBERTA RICH

Roberta Rich, the author of The Midwife of Venice, is American by birth but now divides her time between Vancouver, British Columbia and Mexico. She completed degree in English and anthropology, before studying law at the University of British Columbia and making a career in family law. Well past middle age, Roberta Rich, with ambitions to be a writer, learned that one of her favourite authors, the prolific Joy Fielding, was teaching a course at the University of Toronto called “How to Write a Bestseller”. She enrolled.

Roberta Rich says she was already working on the novel that is now The Midwife of Venice. She submitted the first chapter to Joy Fielding, and the advice given was “More suspense! More suspense! More conflict! They’re not fighting enough!” Joy Fielding recognized that the novel that Roberta Rich was writing had the potential to find a publisher, and as they worked together, they became friends.
Obviously the advice was taken, and worked, and the novel was published in 2011 by Doubleday Canada and has done very well indeed.

The Midwife of Venice takes place in – yes – Venice, in 1575 and we follow the story of a Jewish midwife, Hannah, and her husband Isaac. As Roberta Rich says, about her first visit to Venice in 2007, “We were on a walking tour of the Jewish ghetto, which, if you haven’t seen it for yourself, is like a movie set of narrow, dark buildings and several synagogues, tucked away on second and third floors, out of view. Walking up the staircases and through musty passages and narrow streets strung with drying laundry, I began to wonder what life must have been for Jews who flocked to the ghetto as one of the few safe havens available at the time. I started thinking about my characters and a plot almost immediately after visiting the ghetto. Within a few weeks, I had a pretty good sense of the character and how I wanted the plot to progress.”

The Jewish Ghetto in Venice is unique in that it is basically unchanged since the 1500’s. The buildings are mostly the same but life there is very different now than it was at the time of this novel. In the novel we have the Jews of Venice confined to the Ghetto from midnight until the ringing of the morning bells of St. Marks. When the fictional Hannah ventures out of the Ghetto to assist a Christian woman in a difficult birth she knows she is risking her own safety, but she hopes that by doing so she may be able to help her husband who has been forced into slavery.

Today the Ghetto is home to very few Jews, the synagogues are used for various purposes; some open only for certain holidays and the tours explaining the history of the Ghetto and the Jews of Venice. The Midwife of Venice is a good place to start if you are planning a trip to Venice and are interested in the Jewish history of the city. Happily for readers who enjoyed this book, you will be very pleased to know that Roberta Rich is currently working on a sequel and will continue the story of Hannah and Isaac – and will very likely be as bestselling a novel as The Midwife of Venice.

Donna Leon & Venice

There are only a few books that I have read more than once – discovering again each time why I enjoyed them so much the first time. And there are some authors who capture a place so perfectly that when you travel to that place theirs are simply the only books to read while there. For me Venice is Donna Leon and Donna Leon is Venice – and I know that I am not alone.

Before a trip to Venice I re-read a couple of my favourite novels in the Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery series by Donna Leon and took a couple of others with me – as well as several books by other authors that I ended up putting aside, as I rushed off to a bookshop to buy more Donna Leon.

I started with Dressed for Death, published in 1994, it is only the third in the series and we meet a younger and slightly more idealistic Brunetti than in the more recent novels. Poor Guido is left behind by his family who head off to the mountains for a summer holiday – this is the usual summer practice of Venetians, leaving the heat and humidity and the onslaught of tourists to escape to the cool fresh air of the nearby mountains in August each year – many closing their restaurants and businesses to do so. When a man, dressed in a woman’s clothing, is found murdered in Mestre, the industrialized mainland close to Venice, Brunetti finds himself sequestered to help the short staffed Mestre police. His holiday plans disappear in the humidity and Brunetti finds himself investigating the world of prostitutes and transvestites, finding among them the influence and involvement of some powerful but not so respectable local citizens.

After a visit to Acqua Alta Books I followed this with Doctored Evidence, published in 2003. I chose this title because the story takes place in Cannaregio, the neighbourhood were we made our home for a couple of cold weeks in January. This book was written almost 10 years after Dressed for Death and things have changed. There are now telefonios, a young policeman who had a bit part in the earlier book is now Lieutenant Scarpa and a thorn in the side of our beloved Brunetti (I always think of the evil Scapia in Tosca when I read Scarpa’s name). Again it is August, hot and humid in a city full of tourists and many Venetians are out of the city to escape it all. When a nasty old woman, Signora Grismondi, is murdered it is quickly decided that her eastern European maid is guilty. Some time passes before Signora Grismondi’s neighbour returns from holiday with evidence that may change things, and it is Brunetti, who had also been on holiday, who picks up the case for a second look. By now Signorina Elettra and Brunetti have a very efficient and effective working relationship, with her contacts and her computer she has the answers he wants before he even knows to ask the questions.

Having rushed through Doctored Evidence in a day, in bed with a vicious Venetian flu, I returned to Acqua Alta for one more book. Friends in High Places, published in 2000, finds Brunetti with a very personal problem. He receives a visit from serious young building inspector who tells him about a plan to consolidate various departments related to buildings in Venice, and then asks Brunetti to produce documents regarding the purchase of his apartment and all plans and approvals for any renovations that have been done since he has lived there. The Brunetti’s have lived in this apartment for many years, their children have grown up there, and Guido does indeed have his papers. They are not, however, in order according to Franco Rossi, and in fact there is no evidence – on paper – to show that the Brunetti’s apartment exists. You can very well laugh, as Guido does at first, but it is a serious problem. It is a problem that Guido’s wife, Paola, could solve with a simple chat with her father, but Guido forbids it – he will settle this himself. When Franco Rossi is found dead the story becomes – as we fully expected – a murder investigation.

I finished reading Doctored Evidence on the plane on the way home and with great satisfaction passed it along to my husband who will continue to read about Venice for a few more days while I move on to all the books I did not read on my holiday.

The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons

The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons is a novel that will appeal to all of those who are watching the BBC series Downton Abbey – and who is not!? This novel captures a time and place, taking the reader to another world. There is an old-fashioned quality to the storytelling and the writing, and you will find yourself immersed in this novel from the very start.

We meet the Landau family, parents Anna, an opera singer, and Julian, a novelist, and their daughters Margot and Elise. They live in affluent comfort in Vienna until the days just before the Second World War. Anna and Julian are well aware of the danger they will all face if they remain in Vienna. Their eldest daughter, Margot, has just married and is emigrating to the United States with her husband – sorry to be leaving her family but excited to begin her married life in a new country. Elise is granted a visa to go the England to work as a maid – this is the only way her parents have found to get her out of Europe to a place where she will be safe.

So, we have 19 year old Elise Landau packing her fashionable clothes, including a ball gown and her Hermes scarves, and off she goes to work in the country house of the Rivers family in Dorset. This girl who was always served by a maid herself, whose meals were made by the family cook, whose baths were run for her, is now the most junior of the domestic staff in a British country house. It is a difficult transition, made all the more so because she so desperately misses her family and fears for their safety.

Anna and Julian are struggling to get visas themselves so that they can leave Austria for New York where Anna has been promised work with the Metropolitan Opera. As time passes there are more and more expensive bribes to demanded in order to secure a visa, and everyone knows that time is running out for the Jews of Vienna.

As Elise observes the family who employ her, the household staff and the local villagers she describes a life that is lost in time – as she later says she “had not realized I was living in Arcadia until it was time to leave”. The Second World War changed the structure of British society forever, as the old aristocratic families struggled to hold on to their estates. Only a generation after the First World War young men are once again going off to war, many not returning, leaving elderly parents without heirs. Young women who left home to work in the factories and in the fields, will never again to be content to be treated simply as decoration.

Natasha Solomons knew she wanted to write something about the Jewish girls who came to England to work as domestic help during the Second World War. Many, like her character Elise, came from homes where they had been the waited upon, not those doing the waiting. The household staff at Tyneford is very proper indeed, we learn all about the “behind the scenes” operation of a grand country house, standards must be kept no matter how difficult this becomes, as the country is more and more affected by the war.

In the beginning the war seems far away for all but Elise, who listens for news of what is happening in Europe. It is not until England enters the war and the young men leave to fight that life really changes at Tyneford House. Elise now works in the fields as well as in the house. She has come to love this part of England, the sea and the fields, the people for whom she works and lives with, the fishermen and the villagers – but still she misses her family and worries about their fate.

At the end of the story it is revealed that the novel was inspired by a real place. Tyneford House and the village surrounding it are based on the ‘ghost village’ of Tyneham in Dorset. This house was eventually taken over during the war with the owner, and the whole village evacuated. The house and village are still deserted – a beautiful piece of countryside and coastline frozen in time – the time that Natasha Solomons has so perfectly captured in The House at Tyneford.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Many readers discovered the work of Joan Didion a few years ago when her book The Year of Magical Thinking was published, and became an instant bestseller. This book was about the year following the sudden death of her husband, John Dunne, and her own experience with grief.

Little did she know that her experience with grief was only just beginning. Joan Didion’s husband died in 2003, and their daughter, Quintana Roo, died less than two years later, in 2005. One can only imagine the devastation of this experience.

Joan Didion describes her new book, Blue Nights, as a meditation on motherhood and aging. A book she says was so difficult to write that she almost returned the publishers advance.

Blue nights, for Joan Didion, are the long summer solstice evening hours, a time of reflection, a melancholy time. As she explores her own experience as a mother, and as she revisits her daughters childhood years Joan Didion looks at that time with the maturity of age, and the clarity of grief.

I have put two photographs with this review – one taken of Joan and Quintana in 1969, when Joan would have been 35 years old, a beautiful and happy mother – and one taken this year, Joan Didion at 77, a woman worn by time – and grief.

Early in this book Joan Didion writes “this was never supposed to happen” and then wonders why we might think this, as none of us are “promised a special exemption” from the heart-breaking things that might happen in our life. Many of us share her experience of “the ringing telephone you wish you had never answered”. She goes on to think about the “ordinary blessings” we all share, that really are not ordinary at all – they must be cherished each and every day.

As this mother remembers, she acknowledges what she can now see as warning signs, that all was not well with her daughter, but life was busy and she had no reason to look for them at the time. She does have wonderful memories of her daughter’s childhood, and later of her wedding – a lavish celebration for family and friends. Joan Didion and John Dunne were busy writers, traveling constantly, moving in celebrity circles, their daughter always with them. But memories do not bring solace to a grieving parent – those memories may simply contribute to the pain, they may simply make it all the more awful that this child is no longer living.

After Quintana Roo’s death, her mother reflects on all the things she wished she’d said when her daughter was alive, that she can’t tell her now – how much she appreciated her – how much she should have appreciated the small things – how she should have told her daughter how much her mother loved her. She also noted that as a parent you promise to protect your child, but that children are inherently unprotectable.

Joan Didion has been interviewed by Charlie Rose many times on his PBS interview program. In a recent interview about Blue Nights it was obvious that Charlie Rose was being as gentle as he could be with a very fragile looking Joan Didion, but he did not shy away from asking about the difficult questions that she examined in her book. She spoke about this book being not only about her daughter, and her experience with grief, but also about how we think of ourselves as we age – something she had never spent much time thinking about in the past. Not only do our children age, but we do as well.

Asked, by Charlie Rose, “How do you survive?”, Joan Didion answered, “by going from day to day”. She knows she is not responsible for all of the things that she cannot help but feel guilty about, and she does not regret her life. In her sadness, when asked what she lives for, she answered, “certain small moments of great beauty” such as an unexpected sublime sunset.

An amazing woman, an exceptional book.

Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland

Susan Vreeland has a reputation for writing well researched and well written novels about artists. Her most recent book Luncheon of the Boating Party lives up to our expectations.

I came across scraps of information about the life of the artist Auguste Renoir in a couple of books I read recently, in Claude and Camille by Stephanie Cowell where he is a friend to the painter Claude Monet, and again in The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund De Waal where he is mentioned as a painter whose work is collected by Charles Ephrussi in Paris in the 1880’s, just as Impressionism was becoming fashionable as part of La Vie Moderne.

Renoir, by the age of 39, had a reputation for painting portraits – family portraits and women in the nude. He lived the quintessential Montmartre artist’s life – struggling to make a living and bedding a string of actresses who modeled for him. In this novel we meet Renoir at a point in his career when he has been experimenting, with other artists of his time, with a new style of painting which became known as Impressionism. Of course now Impressionist Art is highly regarded but that was not so at the time, except by some very astute art collectors. Renoir questions whether or not he is wise to continue to paint this way but is compelled to make one more painting in the Impressionist style before giving it up to go back to the unsatisfying but lucrative portrait painting.

Renoir chooses his location, a popular Inn and restaurant on a river outside of Paris. He knows the family and they agree to allow him to rent a balcony overlooking the river, where he proposes to paint a group of people enjoying lunch and conversation. There we meet the lovely daughter of the Inn keeper and the others who will model for this painting. The others include the wealthy banker and art collector Charles Ephrussi, as well as other painters and actresses and models, and for a time the writer Guy de Maupassant. Renoir hired and paid the models, who were required to come to the restaurant each Sunday for a period of several summer weekends. They spent time boating, eating a generous and beautifully prepared meal, and then posed to Renoirs direction until he was satisfied with his days work – or the sun set.

We learn about Auguste Renoir himself, a man with a reputation with women – and a man who always put his art first. And, we learn a great deal about art as we read, especially about the Impressionist movement. We read about the change happening at this time in the way in which art was exhibited and the rise of commercial galleries. We learn about life during the Siege of Paris, which all of these characters had lived through only ten years earlier, during the Franco Prussian War.

I found myself looking at the painting over and over again as I read, as the painting’s journey progresses through the novel and changes are made – people added or removed by the magic of oil paint as Renoir made decisions about the composition. The painting itself hangs in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. where we can all have the pleasure of viewing it, which was Renoir’s desire. Susan Vreeland saw the painting there some years ago. With much research she discovered who they were, and with her writer’s imagination began to invent stories about the people portrayed. Luncheon of the Boating Party is the happy result of this author’s ability to blend fact and fiction into a very revealing novel.