Against Paradise
Shawna Lemay’s rich, amused, insistent, ingenious meditation on Venice will surprise readers with its peculiar grace. Here is the work of an elegant raconteur; a self-effacing, sharp-eared occupier of voices; a high-toned, compassionate gossip. From many mouths, she offers us the city, doomed, full of light.
Lemay’s Venice is a small, crowded community of the delightfully eccentric dead. Through her quirky dramatic monologues, each one shimmering with a companionable intelligence, we meet them – George Eliot, Peggy Guggenheim, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Effie Ruskin, Ernest Hemingway, Titian, various unnamed others; we meet them in mid-speech; it seems they have never stopped talking, talking, telling now (or refusing still to tell) their secrets, protecting their vanities still, finally saying what they…