Review written for ClubReading.com by Tony
A wild and wonderful fantasy unleashed by Erica Jong’s poetic and deliciously sensual imagination. In this romp through time, Jessica, a judge at the Venice Film Festival, mysteriously receives a series of sonnets, written in beautiful calligraphy and enclosed in parchment envelopes. Magically, Jessica finds herself transformed into a Venetian Jewess of Shakespeare’s time. A delightful tale, in which I learned that the Venetians have a word for the shimmering light reflected from water onto ceilings, and was inspired to peruse “The Merchant of Venice,” which is woven into the plot. This was one of those rare stories that I willingly allowed to suspend my disbelief and draw me into another world.
EXCERPT FROM Serenissima: A Novel of Venice:
Most of the expatriates had left Venice by now, so only the diehards were present in that train of gondolas that followed the funeral barge as baby ducklings follow a big mother duck. In one of the gondolas were Arlecchina and her loyal toothless retainer. Hunched under her umbrella (held for her by the toothless one), Arlecchina smiles as if she loved funerals. I guess certain very old people reach an age where every funeral becomes some sort of insane confirmation of strength, rather than of vulnerability, as it is when we are in our thirties or forties and our friends die.
“I know you!” she called to me, as she always did, when our gondolas came abreast at the landing of the cimitero. “Jessica,” she said, looking into my eyes with her uneven, witchy gaze. “But which Jessica are you?” And she cackled wildly like a cartoon witch.
Presently, she pulled off long black gloves (that looked to be of some strange fur-cat fur, could it be?) and she drew a gold ring off a gnarled finger. She handed it to me across the arm’s length of freezing water.
“Wear it,” she said. “And if you go to the synagogue and wish on it there, so much the better.”
Thunderstruck, I took the ring, put it on-it fit perfectly-and looked at it.
Did I imagine this or did it really scald my finger as if it were heated in some flame? (Or was the flame in Arlecchina’s flesh?) The ring had a transparent crystal enclosing an elaborate knot of auburn hair. It was the sort of ring they used to give away at funerals centuries ago, distributing the deceased’s hair (and thus his magic) among his loyal friends. Around the bezel were inscribed some letters, nearly rubbed out of the gold by time, but what they were I could not make out. Or even which language. Was it Latin, English, Italian? The letters were so faint I could not tell.
“The synagogue,” said Arlecchina again, cackling. Then our gondolas drifted apart and I was left with the ring burning through my finger, and a feeling of unreality about what had occurred.