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Venetian Blindness

My husband is a historian and though he married a fiction writer, he will rarely read anything that doesn't come equipped with footnotes and bolstered by other substantiating data. So me reading a historical novel ought to have been a way to at least partially bridge the fact-fiction (or truth-lies, as he would put it) chasm dividing us.

I approached M.L. Lovric's The Floating Book then with an ulterior motive. Lovric's novel takes place in 15th century Venice and focuses upon the introduction of the printing press. I had hoped that I could glean all the pleasures of fiction and "good" literary fiction at that -- like Atonement, Return of Martin Guerre, et all. And reading Lovric's extensive list of the characters in her book who were real people, her author's bio revealing that she is a student of Venetian culture and, if even more persuasively, that she lives in a Venetian-style house -- I felt truly virtuous. The best of historical fiction allows us to understand history -- dare I say it -- even better than those dried-out old tomes that my spouse reads. We can justify the guilty pleasures of untruth by buttressing them with the hidden medicine of fact. And to top it all off, I might gather enough important information as to lure him from the Burns brothers and their never-ending slow pans over black and white photos accompanied by poignant voiceovers from long dead Civil War soldiers.

"Do you know that the printing press was brought to Venice by Germans?" I asked, beginning my attempt to dazzle him with my learning. (While this conversation didn't actually take place, this is a dramatic recreation of a dialogue that could have occurred and the characters who speak these words are based upon actual people.) "Oh, well," he answered, "That would stand to reason since it was invented by Gutenberg in the Rhine Valley. But, of course, it's a fascinating time period and Marshall McLuhan came up with his famous `medium is the message' idea while writing about how the invention of moveable type changed the way people thought about themselves."

I stammered, attempting to keep up my end of the conversation, "Some people weren't too happy about the printing press, especially a dwarf, an insane monk and a pig-faced nun." (Oops, the dwarf and the monk were creations of Lovric.) "Well, there were religious people who didn't like the idea, since one of the controversial early texts that the German guy publishes is the poems of Catullus which were quite erotic and written to his married lover whom he called Lesbia."

Maybe I was getting somewhere. It could be have been the word "erotic" but more likely it was the mention of a real name of a real person. I could see the need to provide an example in order to shore up my scholarly position. "There aren't any erotic examples really in the book itself -- not from Catullus anyway, except that whenever he says sparrow he means penis." Panic struck. What was in this book that I didn't already know? Surely in the 300-plus pages, I must have gleaned a bit more history that this paltry showing.

I riffled through the pages coming upon the part where the anti-heroine Sosia, a Venetian sexaholic suffering from some unpleasant childhood experiences and her soon-to-be spouse, the kindly Jewish doctor, Rabino, share a sexual moment in the kitchen, resulting in some excess --"a splash of foamy liquid glittered on suddenly on the flagstone" -- and I point to this as an example of historical accuracy. But by time I start to talk about her affair with Bruno, the innocent editor who works for the German printer, and read how she pulled him on top of her and "noted the smell of cheap tallow soap sighing from his tired sheets," I realize that The Floating Book does not have the same seductive powers that it attributes to Catullus.

I don't bother to reveal how, for the next several hundred pages, Sosia goes on coupling historically, while the honest and good German printer debates whether to print the erotic poems and his honest but tedious wife feels unloved. Half of Venice has sex with Sosia, just as half of Ancient Rome seemed to have sex with Catullus' beloved, the cold and depraved Clodia. (We learn this through a series of fictional letters between Catullus and his brother. Lucky for us, Catullus continues to write to his brother even after his beloved sibling has died, so we are not deprived of any potentially significant plot twists.)

The historical novel has always been a genre attempting to substantiate itself (since well before Sir Walter Scott mastered the form). Even the earliest "histories" came with all manner of "truth" attached to them so as not to be confused with decadent romances. Perhaps feeling guilty about having made up parts of the work, the author felt that he or she had to prove that it was not all was invented. So it is in the historic tradition of the historical novel that Lovric includes assurances that we are not reading some bodice-ripping yarn with nothing more than costumes to distinguish it from fantastically tame pornography. Yet, the most intriguing aspect of the book -- identified by its lovely title -- is never explored. How did the world change when type became moveable and the book became something no longer unique, something now that could be mass produced? How did these "fast books" as her characters call them, alter the consciousness and the relations between characters and the world they inhabit? I'm afraid nothing so complex is ever examined.

Just as a bestseller like The Da Vinci Code allows its readers to feel that they are participating in some kind of learning experience by invoking Leonardo and art history (even if quite a few "facts" are quite fictional), The Floating Book attempts to assuage our desire for the appearance of the highbrow while entertaining us with the low lives lived long ago. Unfortunately, we receive neither the pleasures of the sacred nor those of the profane.