cover design in progress.
I was teaching in Venice in June 2023 when a submersible on its way to view the wreck of the Titanic imploded. The event completed in my mind a novel with multiple narrators. The first narrator marries and then divorces a wealthy Venetian who lives near the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Dorsoduro, Venezia and collects artifacts connected to the Titanic. Isabel Hunter Corelli’s story riffs lightly on Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which she reads sporadically.
The second narrator, Peggy Guggenheim, emerges as a flamboyant raconteur and well-connected art collector whose father drowned on the Titanic and who has experienced a loss regarding her daughter that reactivates that childhood grief.
A third distinctive narrative voice belongs to Matteo Corelli, the first narrator’s ex-husband, a man obsessed by the Titanic and a voyage on the submersible. He gives a radically different account of his marriage to Isabel and rejoices in the transformative growth he has experienced through his daughters.
These three interlocking stories share common themes—marriages and divorces, daughters, work ambitions versus family, Venice herself, changing mores from the 20th to 21st centuries, the sense of eternity. The novel forms a unity rich in voice and in the detailed knowledge of Venice’s sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that I have acquired after years of teaching there. The book ends with a short epilogue from the point of view of a waiter with red glasses who has made several Zelig-like appearances.
Lively, fun, and full of details that make you feel like you can hear through palazzo walls,Venice Voices is set between The Floating City, Peggy Guggenheim’s artistic circles, and the afterlife of the Titanic.