Juan Manuel de Prada: The Tempest

Sceptre

$24.95

Review: Elspeth Sandys*

I came to this novel with high expectations. Juan Manuel de Prada, hailed at the age of 25 as a leading writer of his generation, has published three novels, a collection of short stories and a series of meditations. The Tempest, his second novel, won the prestigious Planeta Prize, and has sold 300,000 copies in its Spanish edition.

Add to this that the novel is set in Venice, a city that cannot fail to fascinate, and I was sure I was in for a particularly pleasurable reading experience.

Sadly, this did not prove to be the case. Were it not for the sordid nature of the subject, and the author's repeated dwelling on the more repellent aspects of sexuality, I would be at a loss to understand why this novel has received such high praise. One critic, citing its eroticism, has predicted cult status for the book. I hope he's wrong.

When compared to the film Death in Venice, with which it has some elements in common, The Tempest struck me as trite and voyeuristic. The film, and Thomas Mann's story which inspired it, are profound meditations on death and desire. De Prada's novel manages only some interesting observations on the painting with which this story begins and ends, Giorgione's The Tempest.

The narrator, a young Spanish art researcher, travels to Venice to study the Giorgione painting. He is drawn into a web of art forgery, sexual decadence and murder. This is clearly meant to intrigue, but left this reader bored. Ballesteros, the narrator, is so careless and naive it's hard to credit him with so much specialised knowledge. His reactions to every female he encounters - in particular the enigmatic Chiara - quickly become a catalogue of unfulfilled lust.

Somehow he manages to witness a murder; overhear a conversation about a murder that has been concealed; be informed by a stranger that Chiara is having an incestuous affair with her putative father; steal a heavy chest, a crucial link in the chain of forgery and murder, from under the nose of his far-from-innocent landlady; and witness and take part in a number of sordid sexual encounters while participating in the Venetian carnival.

Too much for this reader, despite some powerful (if too often repeated) descriptions of the doomed but beautiful city of Venice.

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland novelist.