Book Review: "Watermark" by Joseph Brodsky

“Local fog in Venice has a name: nebbia. It obliterates all reflections ... and everything that has a shape: buildings, people, colonnades, bridges, statues. Boat services are canceled, airplanes neither arrive, nor take off for weeks, stores are closed and mail ceases to litter one’s threshold. The effect is as though some raw hand had turned all those enfilades inside out and wrapped the lining around the city... the fog is thick, blinding, and immobile... this is a time for reading, for burning electricity all day long, for going easy on self-deprecating thoughts of coffee, for listening to the BBC World Service, for going to bed early. In short, a time for self-oblivion, induced by a city that has ceased to be seen. Unwittingly, you take your cue from it, especially if, like it, you’ve got company. Having failed to be born here, you at least can take some pride in sharing its invisibility...”

- Watermark by Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky was born in 1940 in the Soviet Union and was initially an unruly and naughty child at school. An interest in languages inspired his love of travel and translating, learning languages like Polish and English would prove really useful for the latter. As a poet, he was denounced by his homeland as being 'anti-Soviet' in 1963 and thus sentenced to five years of hard labour. His sentence was commuted in 1965. He would later travel to Austria and then to America, becoming a citizen of the latter. He became the fifth Russian-born writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. Mostly remembered for his poetry, I am aptly impressed by his contribution to travel writing. The book 'Watermark' happens to be on his travels to and in Venice, Italy.

Sometimes subtitled An Essay on Venice, Brodsky might be buried in Venice, Italy, but he shows us his living love for it in great vignettes from everywhere and anywhere. From the boat that took him there to the women he saw, from the monuments to the people and the houses they live in - Brodsky's love letter to Venice is incredibly written and has a really calm and endearing perspective.

One thing I adored in this book more than just the subject matter was the writing. Brodsky's writing has always been fascinating to me. He writes prose with such lyricism that you cannot help but turn it into a poem in your mind. His poetry has always been exactly what you would want poetry to be - an imaginative pondering of slow emotive thoughts. He writes Watermark in the same way as he talks us through Venice and its beauty, he relays to us the importance of the entire city being built with canals, the water blending with the atmosphere of everything around it and becoming part and parcel of the city's very personality. This is done without a single cliché and has such grace that when you read the lines, you cannot help but stop and breathe for a while.

Water equals time and provides beauty with its double. Part water, we serve beauty in the same fashion. By rubbing water, this city improves time’s looks, beautifies the future. That’s what the role of the city in the universe is. Because the city is static while we are moving. Because we go and beauty stays. Because we are headed for the future, while beauty is the eternal present.

- Watermark by Joseph Brodsky

He makes realisations about beauty and thought and how the two may not be connected, but they continue to diverge and converge in different ways. He thinks about the way beauty is percieved as more important than thought and how beauty can get away with things thought cannot. He admits to feeling as though he once believed that beautiful people are always thoughtful and is somewhat subdued when he finds out that they are very rarely so. He makes these admittances whilst pondering on a beautiful woman with hazel eyes. This is probably my favourite part of the book, not because of the realisations but because she is described in such an incredible way.

All in all, Joseph Brodsky seeks to help the reader understand Venice as he does, a great city with a lot to offer but also a poetic city bound to the water as it is bound to its history. A lyrical and poetic mind almost sets it free and the reader is left feeling like even though they may have never visited Venice, they have already been and come back.