The sun is beginning her descent. The last few rays of sunshine illuminate my living room as I curl up tighter under my blanket. In the last remains of the day, my red wine shines purple hues onto my plate of grilled salmon and rosemary seasoned potatoes. I feel my room soak up the evening as I turn to the final chapter of A Thousand Days in Venice.This is a book for romantics, for those who believe in love. In the words of the Chicago Tribune, it is “a true, disarming, and unexpectedly endearing romance…not the idealistic hero and heroine, not their lusts, but the comedy and tenderness of two lives joined together rather belatedly.”It’s 1989. Marlena De Blasi, a food journalist and chef, steps foot in Venice for the first time. She’s awestruck by the power of the city, by her smells, her sights, her essence. At this very moment, a man spots Marlena from across the Piazza San Marco and falls in love. When Marlena returns to Italy a year later, this “stranger”—as she affectionately calls him—tries to pursue her. The heartbreak of her recent divorce leaves Marlena feeling weak, incapable of love, and she kindly rejects the stranger’s offers. However, within months of their first actual meeting, Marlena packs up her life in St. Louis and moves to Venice to marry this man who looks like Peter Sellers.Over the course of three years, we see these two seasoned people forge a relationship built on passion, trust, and fine food and dining. Although they are both mature in years, their relationship is somewhat childlike: fresh, new, exciting, passionate, and romantic. Through the shear poetry of Marlena’s true account of her life with The Stranger, we get a plate full of the food and flavors of Italy and a hearty taste of life in this city of love. Her Venice is the Venice of my dreams, the Venice of romantics.A Thousand Days in Venice could act as a travel book for couples vacationing there. Included are locations of different cafes around the city, “A Lover’s Guide to Venice” where Marlena literally lays out the perfect romantic spots, and a spread of some of Marlena’s mouthwatering recipes: “A Gratin of Leeks,” “Fresh Pasta with Roasted Walnut Sauce,” “Sleeping Plums,” “Potato Bread,” “Fried Squash Blossoms,” “Traditional Tuscan Tomato Porridge,” “Skewers of Sausage and Fig-Stuffed Quail Sitting on Pillows,” “Whole Roasted Pumpkin Stuffed with Porcini and Truffles,” “Loin of Veal Braised with Wine Grapes,” “Wild Mushrooms Braised in Late-Harvest Wine,” and “Lemon Gelato with Vodka and Sparkling Wine.”A Thousand Days in Venice is a full course romance seasoned with recipes, stories, and culinary observations…but the main course here, the piatto principale, is the story of a woman, a man, and the city that inspired them to fall in love. It’s a rich and delicious Italian meal for anyone who believes in love.“Take my hand and grow young with me;don’t rush, don’t sleep;be a beginner;light the candles;keep the fire;dare to love someone;tell yourself the truth;stay inside the rapture.”–A Thousand Days in VeniceRead more at http://thehobbeehive.wordpress.com
The subtitle of this book is An Unexpected Romance. In this memoirs-autobiography-travelogue the author twists about her real-life experiences in a time-tripping, flowery-written account, to create the semblance of a fictional Venetian romance novel. We get history, Italian culture, the problems of the immigrant, and lots of late-romance angst.While reading A Thousand Days in Venice I found myself thinking about the humorist Mark Twain's observation that "Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense." Not much about the author's decision to pursue a relationship with her "stranger", as she calls him, makes sense. Falling in love does not make sense. It is temporary insanity. So we should probably suspend our disbelief at the author's actions, and just accept the truth for what it is, which is a huge life gamble that may have paid off.The truth is that a middle-aged woman leaves her home, her business, and her family and moves to Venice to be with a Venetian man who picked her up in a pretty creepy fashion, pursued her in an obsessive manner, and swept her off her feet with intensely romantic lines that too closely resemble lines from bad romance novels. So, yes, truth is stranger than fiction!The author is a skilled writer. She uses the present tense to keep the story immediate for the reader. Her first person account shows her baroque character to perfection. Her prose is baroque and poetic, sometimes to the point of incomprehension. I suspect this was intentional. The author wanted to minimize the criticism of her actions, and to protect innocents on the periphery of her story. I respect this.Please read my full and illustrated review at Italophile Book Reviews.http://italophilebookreviews.blogspot...
Do You like book A Thousand Days In Venice (2003)?
So I have this experiment that I'm trying, call it book monogamy. For the past week, I've tried reading one book at a time. Granted, I'm not sure how long this can last, but I fear that as I go along with this, some books may fall by the wayside because in this dedication of time, I must feel a sweltering invigoration from the book I am reading--okay maybe at least something close. I hope that this experiment doesn't find me meandering through books, looking for something I didn't lose in the first place. When I picked up this book, I did so for the language. There is something about reordering of words, be it simple or complex, that drives me. A unique sprinkle of dialect here or there, a riff on language. This book is written in the present tense, about a chef and food writer who falls in love with a stranger. Scary, because in the beginning, he seems like a stalker--follows her to a restaurant where he calls her from a telephone, tries to set up dates, follows her where she goes, tells her that he had seen her months back, while she was on a food trip to Venice. There was an allure to the simple present tense structuring, the way certain words played off off each other in the beginning, semi-lyrical. Maybe this was what drew me to it. Or maybe it was because of Venice--how can you love a city you haven't even seen? Maybe it was because of the romantic angle. Despite all this, however, I just could not read beyond forty-one pages. I found myself strangely stuck, unable to read more about Fernando and how he has smoked since ten years of age. Or about the memoirist, a businesswoman who tortures her contractors into building a romantic abode in Missouri, becomes part-owner in a cafe, only to sell the house prematurely, leave her business partners stranded, and move in with a man she calls a "stranger." It was at that point the story stood still a bit for me, so I'll place this aside for later...
—Cheryl
About 50 pages into this book, it started to feel very familiar and I realized that I have read at least the beginning of it once before, but for the life of me I cannot remember when.I must say, as romantic as I believe myself to be, I found it very hard to believe that this smart, successful, and creative woman would sell her house and leave everything she knew in the USA behind to move sight unseen into the rather sordid, well okay, somewhat deteriorated flat of this rather unremarkable Venetian.I get that she felt a powerful passionate bond with him (even though it was forged as he stalked her through Venice. Admittedly, not hard to do; Venice is so small.) But we never learn (at least not in the first 50 pages) what is so attractive about him to her. Even if he were an unlikely object of desire to her (and she sounds rather attractive herself), what woman moves in with a man without even SEEING where he lives? She was lucky he did not have an aging mother tucked away in that flat. (Of course, he did have a set of rather weird characters as caretaker and concierge of his building, but that is probably just how it is in Venice.)I could not take anymore. (neither could I the first time I read it, apparently.)I stopped reading. I don't want to know what happened.
—Silvio111
Italy fascinates me and this book was highly recommended so I just had to buy it. I was not disappointed. De Blasi's approach to living parallels mine, which is: never be afraid to start again; never stop believing in the power of love; let your life be an adventure; never stop learning and growing; go with your heart even if all the voices say you're crazy to step away from the safe, tried and true... As a prolific reader and a writer, I found her writing style exquisite. Her imagery does justice to the beauty of Venice, to the delectable food, to the complexity of the relationship between herself and 'the stranger'. Some of the reviews here lament that the pace of the memoir is slow. So what? Why must one be harried and hurried through every damn thing? I prefer to take the time to properly savour good food, good writing, good lovemaking. Pace is not everything.Looking forward to reading the memoir set in my dream place, Tuscany, as well as everything else Marlena De Blasi has written.
—Liane Spicer
