Amazon.ca
The Venetian's Wife is another beautifully designed pictorial romance by Nick Bantock, the author of the wildly successful Griffin & Sabine books. All of Bantock's familiar tricks are in play here: he tells a fantastical story through a series of letters (and, in this case, e-mails), embellishing it with gorgeous collages, photographs, and whimsical illustrations. This time, his heroine is Sarah Wolfe, a repressed young art restorer. Sarah receives an out-of-the-blue e-mail from one Niccolo Conti, a mysterious collector of Indian antiquities and ostensible heir of an illustrious Renaissance explorer. Conti is charming and fabulously wealthy, and he manages to persuade Sarah to leave her unfulfilling museum job to become his personal researcher, tracking down the lost pieces of his family's unparalleled Indian sculpture collection. As Sarah sets to work, she finds herself involved in a story far stranger than anything she could have anticipated.
Bantock is at best a mediocre writer, but the text of a book like The Venetian's Wife is almost peripheral, a narrative strand that makes the lavish (and often stunning) illustrations more than just a collection of pretty pictures. The Venetian's Wife seems somewhat spare in comparison with Griffin & Sabine (there are no clever pasted-in envelopes here, and sometimes an unilluminated page or two will pass by), but Bantock's fans will likely find it delightful. --Jack Illingworth
From Publishers Weekly
The subtitle of this oversized, lavishly illustrated volume confirms that we are once again in the kind of quasi-mythical kingdom that provided the setting for writer and illustrator Bantok's bestselling Griffin and Sabine series. Phrased thusly: "A Strangely Sensual Tale of a Renaissance Explorer, a Computer, and a Metamorphosis," the subtitle also suggests a major difference in this work: the traditional epistolary tools (letters and postcards) that were the vehicles of communication in the trilogy are here replaced by e-mail messages exchanged by the two protagonists. Fans of the trilogy may not be disappointed that Bantok repeats himself in another respect, however. The situation that bridges time and place is nearly identical to that of the previous books; that is, one of the protagonists is contacted by the other, whom she does not know, but who seems to be able to read her mind. In this case, San Francisco art conservator Sara Wolfe, who is fascinated by a drawing of the Indian god Shiva hanging on the walls of the museum where she works, receives an e-mail message from one N. Conti, who somehow is aware of her obsession and offers her a job traveling around the world assembling Indian art for his collection. The narrative proceeds via these e-mail messages and through the protagonists' entries into their computer journals. In this story, however, Sara and Conti are not fated to be lovers. The latter, in fact, is the ghost of a real-life figure, wealthy Renaissance merchant and indefatigable traveler Niccolo Dei Conti, who died in 1469 and needs Sara's help in order to be reunited with his wife, Yasod, in the afterlife. And Sara, with Conti's help, discovers her own destined mate, a colleague called Marco (surely Bantok's humorous reference to another fabled traveler). The mysteries around which the plot hinge?Conti's identity and his ultimate purpose in reassembling his collection?are suspensefully maintained, augmented by Bantok's intensely colorful and often sensual illustrations. If Bantok has essentially chosen to repeat his winning formula, he has again produced another handsome volume that readers can enjoy. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
by Nick Bantock
by Nick Bantock
