A Thousand Days in Venice

Rating:
Summary: ponderous tale of weighty self-reflection
Review: everyone else seems to love this book - the star I awarded it was only in recognition of the wonderful city of venice in which it is set and the not frequent enough references to food and recipes contained therein. for the rest of it - I could have screamed. I think I might have.

Ms de Blasi has a very ponderous writing style - when I finally hit her expression in which I paraphrase she savoured time like an apronful of warm figs, I hit my limit. Every step she takes is weighty, every mouthful she eats has depth and every observation she makes she imparts as if burdened with wisdom.

and a healthy dose of self-esteem - we are assured she transferred a grotty venetian apartment into a haven of domesticity and style with a deft hand and some old scarves. After taking such a bold move in moving countries, she then seems to decide enough decisions have been made and leaves every other turn and ramble their life takes to The Stranger, who appears kinda weak-willed and slack jawed and rather irritating after a while.

for venice and an appreciation of food and the role it plays in life, only just enough to get me through the self-satisfied prosey prose.

Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful City, A Very Human Story
Review: I've read the on-line debate about this book with pleasure. I understand the conflict, but I come down on the side that says this book is a great read.

I readily agree with those who say the descriptions can be too long and too colorful, and, especially those who say that they could not imagine moving to Venice to marry a "stranger." But, when I finished this book I felt I had spent the last few evenings with a highly entertaining, charming, and impulsive friend. That we had spent the visit talking about life, love, food, and Venice. And, that I wished she could have stayed longer. Not that I wanted to live like her, or agreed with all her decisions, but that listening to her talk was simply fascinating.

I loved the description of small things about Venice, her admission that all in love is not perfect, and her determined, wily temperment.

Take this book to the beach. Use it to spice up a dull week. Read about this woman's flight of fancy. Don't judge her life choices based on practicality or her word choices based on Hemingway. Just relax and enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: Venice in love
Review: This book captured me from the start. By the end of the first chapter, I was in tears, reading it to my mother, explaining about this amazing true story of true love. Captivating writing by a woman who finds love in a stranger, trusts the fates and jumps head first into romance, and a new life in Italy. Take me to Venice so that I can absorb all the romance this sinking city eminates. I cannot wait for the continuing story of Marlena and the stranger.

Rating:
Summary: An unexpected pleasure
Review: Subtitled, "An unexpected romance," I was pleasantly surprised to find this jewel of a book to be in the biography section, but, of course, it is actually a true story of a middle-aged lady (she kind of hides that fact for a while) who leaves everything behind in her American life, including her now grown children, to marry an Italian who somehow fell in love with her simply by seeing her in Venice on a business trip.

Venice is hard to explain to someone who has not been there; it's a city in the past living out the present, as it has for hundreds of years. One wonders what goes on between the canals, in all the second floors of all the buildings that can only be reacted by pedestrian bridges or water taxis. Reading this book after such a trip makes it all the more enjoyable. The addition of recipes in a biography must surely be a first. Also, the use of an autobiographical format to tell a love story, is also very unusual. If there's one fault in the book, it's that we want to more about Marlena's life, both before her U.S. life fell apart but especially after she has been married for several years, after the book's conclusion. It really deserves an Epilogue, but this in no way diminishes the romance, coupled with the pleasures of the water city. But I would like to know her husband('the stranger')'s last name which as I recall, is never even mentioned in the book.

Rating:
Summary: An unexpected pleasure
Review: Subtitled, "An unexpected romance," I was pleasantly surprised to find this jewel of a book to be in the biography section, but, of course, it is actually a true story of a middle-aged lady (she kind of hides that fact for a while) who leaves everything behind in her American life, including her now grown children, to marry an Italian who somehow fell in love with her simply by seeing her in Venice on a business trip.

Venice is hard to explain to someone who has not been there; it's a city in the past living out the present, as it has for hundreds of years. One wonders what goes on between the canals, in all the second floors of all the buildings that can only be reacted by pedestrian bridges or water taxis. Reading this book after such a trip makes it all the more enjoyable. The addition of recipes in a biography must surely be a first. Also, the use of an autobiographical format to tell a love story, is also very unusual. If there's one fault in the book, it's that we want to more about Marlena's life, both before her U.S. life fell apart but especially after she has been married for several years, after the book's conclusion. It really deserves an Epilogue, but this in no way diminishes the romance, coupled with the pleasures of the water city. But I would like to know her husband('the stranger')'s last name which as I recall, is never even mentioned in the book.

Rating:
Summary: An Enchanted Romance with a Man and a Place
Review: A Thousand Days in Venice is proof that it's never too late to live a dream. The story has a fairy tale quality, yet it really happened: Marlena de Blasi, a chef who is at a bit of a loose end in her life meets a Venetian bank clerk who had observed her before on one of her previous trips to Venice and fallen in love. Throwing caution to the winds, (as she says, "There hasn't been a prudent decision in this story."), de Blasi gives in to her love-at-first-sight response to the "blueberry-eyed stranger" and follows her heart where it leads her. Dispersing her home and possessions in the States, she packs up and moves to Venice to be with Fernando. Their romance and courtship against the backdrop of one of the most romantic places on earth is enchantingly and sensuously told. De Blasi is a master at evoking in word pictures the sights, and scents, textures, and sounds of La Sererenissima.
The adustments, compromises, and mutual discoveries that romance and a new marriage bring into the lives of Marlena and Fernando are related with humor and a sense of wonder at the changes brought about by this unexpected later life event. True to her her passion for cooking, foods and recipes play a part in de Blasi's story. Best of all, she ends her book with a selection of recipes that play a role in her romance so that the reader may extend the enchantment into the kitchen.

Rating:
Summary: More than a fairy tale; maybe it's also a parable
Review: Details, the essence of domesticity, shine in this story. There are the travelogue-esque descriptions of Venice: Napoleon's observation about Piazza San Marco and viewing works of art sequestered in ancient churches. There's a discussion of making house, once in the Midwest in a little house I would love to see and again in the grotty chaos of a bachelor's digs. And throughout are delicious descriptions of food and drink and the ways and places to enjoy them.

Like youth, this book may be somewhat wasted on the young. The small ruminations, the reflections on how we find a place and make a place in life may seem over-wrought. Until the onset of my own middle-age, I felt the same way about such memoirs. Now, I greet writings like this with a mixture of recognition and enthusiasm: recognition of the silly ways we fumble along and enthusiasm for another's discovery that it is not too late to savour what is delicious about life. In that, I find a parable of encouragement.

Rating:
Summary: Delightful
Review: This is a light, but thought-provoking book about not giving up on love, taking chances, and compromising without resentment. It is a delightful read, made even more pleasing because it is autobiographical. Would that more of us had this kind of courage and trust in ourselves and those we fall in love with.

Rating:
Summary: Venice . . . a Romantic Springboard to a New Life
Review: Gourmet food writer, gourmand extraordinaire and makeshift interior decorator, Marlena De Blasi, throws caution to the wind when she leaves her home base in America to marry a man she barely knows from Venice. Is she crazy or merely sensationally romantic?

If I were to analyze la bella dona, Marlena, by her writing alone, I would submit that indeed she is a romantic---each of the moments she describes on the island of Lido and Venice proper, wax with almost too much poetry. In spite of this tendency for long windedness, Marlena infuses her little book with such infectious optimism for the future that the reader automatically forgives her indulgences.

After all, it is she, not us, taking the big chance, exchanging her old life for something completely foreign. And she does this, not as a young ingenue in her 20s or early 30s but as a mature woman with grown children. Each of her decisions and contemplations is most intricately explored; questions that arise in any mature mind are handled with an infinite and loving look at a future that isn't as long as it seemed when one was much younger. Brava, Marlena, for giving the spark of love a chance to grow into a flame and to express your anxieties with such honesty.
The first part of Marlena's story ignites that flame within the reader's heart; the details of the mystery Venetian steadfastly wooing the woman of his dreams based on just a glimpse of her profile emulates the great romances. The author's technique of flashing back to her first visit to Venice does not make its thematic point as quickly as one would wish, and so seems to muddy the pace of the actual tale of courtship and marriage. However, this, too does not mar the overall tapestry that De Blasi ultimately crafts.

In the second half of the book. De Blasi deals with her assimilation into the Italian mindset--a transition she makes totally possible through her use of interior design and her love of good food--wonderful recipes of some of the key meals mentioned in the text are thoughtfully provided at the end of the book. The couples' decision to chuck their newly converted Lido apartment for a life of helping others create their own dream environment in Tuscany and Umbria seems perfectly in tune with the book's emphasis on shunning the routine and keeping life a continuum of surprise. I hope that Marlena will follow this book up with a tale of her new adventures as the couple molts into their new lifestyle.

Recommended to all those who love romance and the thought of living in a foreign land.

Rating:
Summary: Reality
Review: I will give credit to Marlena DeBlasi for writing a rather enchanting tale of midlife rejuvenation. She leaves the unhappy "old" new world, and finds romance, love and joy in the "new" old world. Ms. DeBlasi tells her story with considerable pananche: Marlena, the smells, sights and oddities of the city are very much alive. Fernando less so.

My concern is that Ms.DeBlasi seems not to understand that ones history cannot be abandoned. Thomas Mann, in another story about Venice, brilliantly describes the death of a respected writer who rejects his past in exchange for Venetian Eros. Pirandello also comes to mind. In his plays, his characters alter the reality of the past; "reality" is dissociated from "what was", and "what is" becomes what the characters want to behold. In both "Death in Venice" and "Henry IV" outcomes are not good. "A Thousand Days in Venice" hopefully will be the first volume of a trilogy. The second will be an honest appraisal and coming to terms with the past, and the third a remarkable synthesis.

I am taking this little book seriously. Perhaps I am reading too much into it, but I think it represents more than a sassy middle age romance, or a nice story like "Under the Tuscan Sun". Ms. DeBlasi has begun to think about her past, although I do not believe that she has fully come to terms with it. Her "rebirth" is also significant. I am not sure whether it is an escape, and as with the Pirandello characters, a reality based on the perceptions one wants to have, or is it the "real thing". Only Ms.DeBlasi knows that.