Stardust Memories

The Encyclopaedia of Palaces When Versailles was built, this ridiculously grand palace, with acres of looking glass, gold and malachite had no water closet and King and servant alike often shat on the Pavonazza marble stairs. For me Venice is a chimera, a city of over two hundred, 15th century palaces, aching with glittering, cut-glass chandeliers, floating on a milky lagoon that percolates with rotting vegetal matter. In a Venetian carnival, the fool is king for the day and the king is a fool. Literature has acknowledged the disquieting beauty of Venice, the liquorice slug that trickles down the forehead of Gustav von Aschenbach, dying as his lust devours him amid the stench of cholera, the red anorak of the longed for daughter, and murderous dwarf, the bloodthirsty Shylock. Meeting my father after an absence of twenty years, he regaled me with stories of his new identity rooted in his love of Venice. A decorative trifle on the putrefying past he constructed, submerged again now, a ghost in the narrow stone walls of the city. Thomas Mann was staying at the Grand H