By Michelle Lovric
Regan Books
Hardcover

There are so many main characters, it’s hard to know where to start.

Catullus, an aristocratic newcomer to Rome who we first meet in 63 BC could be the main character...we learn about him through his letters to his brother Lucius, a soldier posted far away from Rome. He has fallen in love with an unsuitable woman - wealthy, elegant, powerful, Clodia’s reputation for sexual avarice rivals Messalina’s. He writes poems about her, ribald, raw, romantic, poems that will make Catullus the toast of Rome, briefly, before he dies and his works are forgotten.

The Floating Book Excerpt In certain light-suffused mists, Venice deconstructs herself. One sees faint smears of silhouettes, and in these the architect's early sketches: the skeletons of the palazzi as he saw them on paper when they were only dreams. When the haze lifts, those buildings swell again with substance, as if freshly built. But until that happens the Venetians nose their way around their city. In the thickened air every stink and every fragrance is unbearably intensified. The canals smell of billy goat and grass clippings, the ever-present steam of sea-louse soup smells of dark sea caves, the babies smell of mouse holes, and the women smell of what they desire. When the sea vapor blanked the town in those days, the streets were dark; only the cesendoli, little shrines to the Madonna, remained perpetually lit, and a few lamps under the arcades until the fourth hour of the night. The unpaved streets lurched rutted and holed; the wooden bridges were prone to collapse unexpectedly, rendering the mist, already churning with possibilities of dangerous and wonderful encounters, more threatening and more exciting. ©2004 Michelle Lovric Published with permission from Regan Books

But perhaps the main characters are the Von Speyer brothers, who have traveled over the Alps and away from their homeland of Germany to Venice in 1468, where they hope to introduce movable type to this jewel of a city. They marry into Venice, Johann marrying the cool Sicilian Paola, Wendelin the fiery and sweet Venetian Lussieta. One of their greatest supporters will decide to get Wendelin to publish the works of Catullus...no matter what forces of persuasion he has to bring bear, but the publication of this erotic work will bring much trouble upon them all.

Sosia is not the main character, but she certainly is important. She, like Clodia, sleeps with men like some people collect coins...indiscriminately and obsessively. Unlike Clodia, she’s not rich or powerful, or even particularly pretty. A Serbian who was tortured by solders and left to die, she’s married to Doctor Rabino Simeon, a man she seems to veer between apathy and hate for.

She's also the lowest caste in Venice...a Jew, she has to were a small gold circle on her clothes. Two of her most important customers -- for us, anyway -- are two friends she engages in sort of a love triangle with: Felice Feliciano and Bruno Uguccione. Felice is a fussy, Don Juanish scribe whose true sensual delight is in the forming of words, Bruno is a naive, kind of sweet man who works for the Speyer brothers and who loves Sosia, though the more he shows it, the greater her contempt for him.

The other main character is Venice...Venice in all her noise, in all her scent, in all her color. She is sometimes painted as a fairy tale, a haunted realm of story and myth, more beautiful, more impossible than a dream.

Her marriage to the ocean, perpetrated every year by the Doge who is boated out a little ways from the land in order to drop a ring into the depths of the water to remind both parties of their vows, makes her seem like a chaste princess. Her many courtesans, and the doings of the ladies at one of her nunneries, coupled with the insular attitude of her people, their love for beauty, their ready admission that they, while not lazy, are certainly languid in their moves, paints her as a woman who has more in common with Sosia or Clodia than anyone else.

Bookworm's Briefing
Though we have a lot of characterization and story outside the book world proper, particularly the bittersweet love between Wendelin and his Lussieta, the point where everything Lovric is writing seems to converge is in how the two stories - the story of Catullus first publishing his works and the story of Wendelin publishing them again seem to mirror each other in clever ways.

The cycle of acceptance, praise, and hatred of the poems also mirror each other. In many ways, it’s as if history has repeated itself, only the technology and the faces have changed. In many ways it is a beautiful story, a vivid exploration of Venice that will color perceptions of this magical land for years to come.