3/5 stars.
Paperback, 144 pages.
Read on December 25, 2018.
I knew nothing about the author or the book prior to reading it, and I still, know relatively little about this Nobel Prize winner. Apparently, Brodsky is a kind of a big deal. Literature-nerd fail? Joseph Brodsky was a Russian-American writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. He also became the United States Poet Laureate in 1991. He was practically expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and ended up immigrating to the US where he lived to the age of 55 before dying of a heart attack in the winter of 1996. While living in the US, however, he spent that majority of his winters in Venice, Italy.
This short novel is a semi-autobiographical love story/essay/poem about Venice. It has poetical prose and paints vivid details of the author’s perception of the city’s character. Did this book make me fall in love with a city I have yet to visit? No, it’s more of a personal reflection of each of the different visits that the author took so it provides more insight into the author’s mind more than anything. While Joseph’s writing didn’t speak to me, he is a gifted writer and I am intrigued enough to see what else he has written. Besides, it appears he liked cats so that’s a good enough reason for me to give him another shot.
The Pluviophile Writer 