New Venice is as magnetic as the North Pole it circles: a city state, part fevered fin-de-siecle party, part political tinder-box - an exiled utopia, and an iced-over pressure cooker. This is an overwhelming blizzard of a book, battering the reader with the delirious logic of dreams and the baroque architecture of its prose, blasting you with crisis upon crisis - those of the heart, of the state, of society, of reality itself.
