The Eyes of Venice is such a guilty pleasure that you should be arrested for reading it. It’s a 482 page novel with glossary that takes place in the world of Venice in the 16th century. I say “world” because at that time, Venice was just past its peak and ruled over an extended eastern empire of island possessions. Its nemesis was the overwhelming Islamic empire of the Turks, the great superpower of the region. This was a time when the European world could still be seen as Mediterranean, as “a blue pool in an old garden” as the poet says. There are bare hints in the story of the rise of the Atlantic view and the eclipse of Venetian and Turkish influence that’s to come.

In those days, it seems to me from reading a few histories, men prided themselves on having short fuses. It’s as if they were on extra doses of testosterone before the hormone was discovered. Matteo is head of what we would call a middle class family. He’s a master mason and his extended family consists of his aging wife, Zanetta, son Michele and his wife of three months Bianca, plus whatever workmen he has hired as his crew on construction projects.

His laborers live in his house, crashing where they can. If Matteo has a commission then they all eat. If he doesn’t then the workers won’t know where their next meal is coming from and the family won’t be far behind. Meals consist of soup with whatever Zanetta has to throw into it, mostly some beans, bread, and there’s some sparingly produced wine. Once a year, on St. Martins Day, the rent is due.  If they can’t pay it, they’re homeless.

Considering how dependent Matteo is on construction contracts, it’s startling how bold he is with his patrician patron, Girolamo Lippomano, a Venetian senator.  Matteo is in a chronic struggle with Lippomano to get paid. Matteo suspects that Sir Girolamo hasn’t the money to pay him. When the senator calls for a halt to the building project he commissioned on the trumped-up accusation of being overcharged on building materials, Matteo’s family is on the edge of being ruined.

The Eyes diverges early into two magnificent story arcs as the family of masons is forced to break up. One plot follows Matteo’s son, Michele, in an adventure at sea worthy of an Errol Flynn movie. The star of Captain Blood would have loved to have played Michele, who must face years as a galley slave, among murderous conspiracies involving plundered gold from the Venetian treasury. Michele’s worst enemies are on board his own ship, the comito or first officer, and supracomito, or commander. By Venetian tradition the supracomito is always a Venetian nobleman. This is contrasted with the Turkish system where a talented young man from the ranks is allowed to rise.

While Michele attempts an unlikely survival at sea, his wife Bianca is left in near destitution in Venice with her aging and increasingly enfeebled mother-in-law, Zanetta. I loved the Michele plot line but I preferred Bianca’s smaller-scaled domestic tragedy as the little family of two women slowly dole out their remaining resources in an attempt to survive.
Bianca returns to her pre-marital job as washerwoman but can’t earn enough to meet expenses even though she works to exhaustion. Her mother-in-law finds relief by entering a “hospital”. This is a social work home run by the church where destitute or elderly woman find shelter. Zanetta has to share a bed and the women who are able perform tasks like sewing to help meet expenses.

The Eyes of Venice owes a lot to traditional storytelling, to Boccaccio. Every woman in the “hospital” has a story. And by telling the women’s stories, The Eyes of Venice tells stories within stories as the divergent sagas of Bianca and Michele attempt to reunite. Somehow Alessandro Barbero’s novel reminded me of the post-modern fiction of John Barth that I loved so much when I was younger. I don’t think that The Sot Weed Factor and Giles Goat Boy are read much anymore, let alone an obscurity like Chimera. But I can’t express how much pleasure those old novels brought me with their deliberate but tongue-in-cheek aping of traditional narrative techniques.

Fiction lends us its eyes. “Eyes” might be a good synonym for “story”. The eyes of David Copperfield. The eyes of Middlemarch. In this case it’s The Eyes of Venice. Venice has been  reduced to museum status for quite a while. Open the pages of this story and the dried flower is restored to its living form. From Europa Editions in November.