A Thousand Days in Venice (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

I rarely write book reviews, but I had to warn people about this book. This is a prime example of a desperate, pathetic woman. If there are any really independent women out there who don't feel so desperate for a man that they are willing to move halfway across the world, don't buy this book.

If I didn't know a couple who had a similar experience (except that the locations involved were France and California) I would probably be more dismissive of her wirl-wind relationship with "Peter Sellers." But instead I found myself comparing the ins and outs of their relationship to those details of my parents' friends and nodding knowingly when things matched up.

I simply love the way DiBlasi puts words together in this book. I keep a notebook of phrases and sentences that I find particularly lyrical, and I wrote down 8 or 10 of them from this autobiographical work. I really enjoyed it. My husband also enjoyed it although he wanted closure at the end of the book, and there is none!

What more could you want? Better writing, for one. In the acknowledgments at the end, de Blasi says of her editor, "everywhere in this text that three adjectives remain still lined up in a row is a result of my stubbornness, a sign of the skirmish or two among our battles that Amy let me win." I wish Amy had fought harder!

It's a romantic story. American food writer and chef goes to Venice, meets the man of her dreams who follows her back to the States, she returns to Venice to marry him and they live happily ever after. She writes about things I love, good food, sensuous fabrics, Venetian history and culture. So why didn't I enjoy this book more?

Perhaps it's because the attraction between Marlena and Fernando isn't made real, it just sort of happens. Neither seems particularly likeable; they both come across as very controlling, very selfish people. She calls him, even now, "the stranger", and often writes of him in a very snotty and condescending manner. (How dare he not want my complicated and exotic dishes every night?!)

I had hoped for much more from this book.

In A Thousand Days in Venice, author Marlena de Blasi portrays herself as the woman that Italian banker Fernando falls passionately in love with at first sight, the woman that everyone in Venice seems to be enchanted with, the American that complete strangers all over Italy are charmed by. De Blasi takes risks as a writer and as a woman. The story is not quite believable, but somehow she pulls it off.

By concentrating on the attractions and food of Venice, and by sticking to the unfolding of an unlikely love affair, de Blasi makes A Thousand Days in Venice an enjoyable story. It isn't very long before you stop thinking about how eccentric de Blasi must be in real life and just lose yourself in the romance of Venice.

There was just enough conflict here to keep A Thousand Days from being a soppy travelog. All of de Blasi's friends are convinced that she is making a dreadful mistake by giving up her house and job in Saint Louis (as she insists on spelling it) and moving to Venice to marry a man she had met only months before. Then as she gets to know Fernando better, she finds he has certain ideas about how she should dress, conduct herself, and speak. Will the romance survive the doubts and the clash of cultures?

Of course it does, and after the couple exhausts Venice with their exuberance, they move on to Tuscany to start a new life, and a new book.