Book Report - the Travel Version

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

Do not fret for John Berendt.

Now that he’s famous, he’s stepped up his digs from the American South (Savanah in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil). He’s in Venice this time, but his modus operandi is basically the same. Berendt gets a fat advance, moves to an interesting place, meets weird and interesting (mostly rich) people, and reports it all back to us.

He always tries to organize everything around one central story; in Venice, a 1997 fire laid waste to La Fenice, one of Europe’s premiere opera houses.

OK, this is where I must digress. In college, I spent a few months in Venice, working for La Fenice, pawning tickets to tourists as part of an “internship.” The opera building, like the entire city, was a sumptuous, smelly, and crumbling firetrap.

And corrupt! In order to get a phone line, my roommate and I had to find the man who hooked up the phones, get him purposefully drunk, and then dare him to connect us in the middle of the night. And it worked! And we never once saw a phone bill!

Berendt’s colorful reporting only lightly skims this corruption. I kept wondering if he was secretly hired by the Italian tourist board. In fact, the whole book is really just a charming travelogue, with lots of side-tracking (to the point that the fire investigation is completely forgotten for whole chapters).

In the end, I wondered if Berendt just refused to alienate any future rich people he may write about in any possible future books. That hedging approach does not make for a fascinating expose.


The Rum Diaries by Hunter S. Thompson

Ah, Hunter… This is his very first novel, the one he said would elevate San Juan the way that Hemmingway’s The Old Man and The Sea did for Key West. And in fact, the Puerto Rico of the 1950s is described in filthy, loving detail. Well, The Rum Diaries didn’t quite elevate San Juan, but it is a very strong, coherent start from one of America’s most revered writers (May he rest in peace.)

In fact, the narrator of TRD is a lot like a young Hunter S. Thompson. In his early 20s, Thompson landed in tropical San Juan to write for several months at a shoddy English-speaking paper. And, like the protagonist, Hunter drank incessantly, landed in jail, and was attacked several times by a vicious mob of locals (most likely his own fault; he can’t remember.) It’s very hard to tell where the diary ends and the supposed non-fiction begins.

The book is stylistically fascinating. Thompson’s youthful prose is quite a bit more lyrical and less staccato than in later books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. However, right from the start, Thompson was never as enamored with coherent plot as he was with character and place. Moreover, his people are never very admirable or heroic. Mostly, they get drunk and/or high, do stupid and selfish and reckless things, and then get punished beyond their wildest imaginations.

Should you read this? Well, it depends on what you want. Do you want a plot-driven story full of pretty images, or do you want a bit of aimless self-destruction and moral degradation?