Loredana
A Venetian Tale
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
In 1700, a Venetian priest, Fra Benedict Loredan, compiles an assembly of documents - letters, written confessions, top-secret state files, diary excerpts, pieces of a secret chronicle - which together tell the story of two lovers caught up in a dangerous and controversial revolutionary movement which attempted to do away with the two-tiered city of Venice: Leonardo da Vinci's architectural dream to segregate the rich and the poor described in his Notebooks and realised in this novel. At the centre of the narrative are two written confessions, one by a young girl from an aristocratic family - Loredana Loredan Contarini - who writes of her disastrous marriage to a sadomasochistic tyrant and her subsequent involvement with a revolutionary Friar - himself the second confessor. As both struggle to tell their tales and confess their sins, we are shown around the city of Venice as it might have been in the sixteenth-century and given pieces of a narrative which together form an explosive whole.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The vivid written confessions of a lustful young widow, the eponymous Loredana, and Orso, a Dominican friar with a liberal interpretation of his ecclesiastic vows, are the backbone of this engrossing tale set during the intrigues of Renaissance Venice's Council of Ten. Although the epistolary form can be a cumbersome means of novelistic expression, it is one Martines skillfully manipulates, bringing to life the opulence and grandeur and the rigid social strata and dark political schemes of la Serenissima. High-born Loredana begins her lengthy written confession with a chronicle of her disastrous marriage to the abusive Marco, who'd rather have his male lovers seduce her than touch her himself. Orso's confessions (also to Father Clemente) are interspersed; their revelations include his desire for a new Venice, in which the poor would not be kept in filth and darkness while the rich dine sumptuously in sun-filled palazzos. When Loredana returns to her father's home, she begins a life of study and introspection and then meets Orso. Diary entries by others involved reveal the scandal that the union between Orso and Loredana causes in Venice, which brings the full force of a holy inquisition upon them. Martines's background as a scholar of the Italian Renaissance serves him well in this delicious page-turner of politics and lust.
