Whose Serenissima is it anyway? – Michelle Lovric

Last weekend I had the pleasure and privilege of sharing a stage with the wonderful Mary Hoffman at the Ilkley Festival. We were talking about the different ways in which we fictionalize Venice. And one of the questions that came up was this: ‘How do you both feel when you see yet another novel about Venice hitting the bookshop shelves?’

Neither of us owns Venice. We both earn our right to write about Italy novel by novel. But we did admit to a flicker of annoyance at books that cynically employ the undeniable commercial lustre of Venice to gild their lily – or to put a velvet bow on their dog.

Now I have returned from Ilkley to Italy … only to discover that Mary and I have both been thoroughly trumped in our attempts to write a properly Venetian Venice … perhaps. For a Venetian gondolier has just been and gone and published a novel.

Sad to tell, Angelo Tumino’s novel contains nothing of moonlight, romance or lapping waves. Invasione Negata takes the form of a diary of a widowed retired engineer who finds himself living in a condominium in the suburbs of Rome, surrounded by immigrants who speak other tongues, cook foreign foods – and persecute, rob and attack the native Italians.

Tumino, 36, claims that he is a gondolier only by economic necessity: his true calling is as a writer. He’s hoping that Invasione negata will lift him away from a life at the oar and into a properly literary existence in front of a computer.

Instead, the slim volume has so far propelled Tumino into controversy. The author claims that the book’s intention is to document the most profound fear that strikes the rich nations of the west – fear of the foreigner. He claims that the politicians are incapable of solving the problems and it is the ordinary citizens who pay the costs of clandestine immigration.

‘I would say it is a tale of metropolitan conflict,’ says Tumino.

What he not saying – according to La Nuova newspaper – is if he’s a member of the right-wing anti-immigration Lega Nord. But that’s not stopping others from labelling him that, and worse. The Indymedia Lombardia website has written a profile of Tumino entitled ‘The Nazi Gondolier’. And describes his work as ‘di chiaro stampo hitleriano’ – ‘of a clearly Hitlerian stamp’. But the site has been much criticized for the intemperance of its coverage, and in other places the novel and its writer have been highly praised.

Tumino protests that the character depicted in the novel is not a self portrait. He adds ‘Reading Stephen King, one might think that this is an author with psychological problems. But in fact he is a totally normal person.’

Invasione negata had its official launch at the fish market in Venice on October 12th, as its author (still) serves on the traghetto between Santa Sofia and Rialto.

In Tumino's top drawer are two other books – a collection of comic short stories – The Gondolier without a Gondola and American Gondolier, a science fiction story set in a Venice that has been bought up by the Americans and is inhabited by android gondoliers.

So is it still safe for Mary and me to go in the water, with our historical novels about Venice and Italy?


LINKS

Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series starts in Venice, with City of Masks. The latest book in the series, City of Ships, is just published by Bloomsbury

Michelle Lovric's latest novels about Venice are The Book of Human Skin (Bloomsbury) for adults, and her children’s book, The Mourning Emporium, the sequel to The Undrowned Child, out on October 28th

Angelo Tumino’s website
gondola photo by Debbie Patterson