Nor any drop to drink
Janet Barron
WATERMARK by Joseph Brodsky
Hamish Hamilton, ,C12.99, pp. 135
If J. Alfred Prufrock had been posted to Venice, this is the sort of lovesong he might have produced. Joseph Brodsky is America's self-deprecating Poet Laureate, a writer so distinguished that it now seems every word is wrung out of a torment of existence. Watermark is, professedly, a novel which is not a novel, but rather a series of meanderings through the watery city, in which Brodsky reflects that what Venice offers is incomparable beauty and touristic rip-off.
He presents himself as an amiable, age- ing man, prone to unrequited love and heart-attacks. He is an intellectual sensual- ist, facing himself in mirrors which reflect, as his prose does, a degree of introspection which take him into time and space and death. A gondola ride is an erotic sensa- tion, tempered by the thought that no real Venetian would ever use such a mode of transport, unless carrying home the luxury item of a TV set or a sofa. At times, this writing is funny, hut more often it seems to strive for Nabokovian special-effects, and to be lacking in a lightness of touch.
Brodsky uses surreality and alienation to present life as at once comic and deeply serious, sliding the absurd into the cosmic. 'When the duty-free opened mid-flight,' he writes of a round trip from Detroit, the passengers
rushed to the plane's rear, and for a moment I had a vision of a good old 707 flying over the Atlantic crucifix-like: wings out-stretched, tail down.
This is the sort of observation, difficult to convey by brief quotation, which makes Watermark feel like the stuff of endless graduate seminars, in which the author explains what it was that he was trying to say.
The book is elusive, hinting at seductions which fail to take place. The city itself, in the cold light of winter, is the tantalising
mist less, luring the author into unfathomable obsession. Metaphysical speculations mingle with refutations of Freudian theory; the literary allusions are thicker than the viscous water. 'It sur- rounds you like frozen seaweed, and the more you dart and dash about trying to get your bearings, the more you get lost.
Watermark itself is like this, clinging in its fine writing and spectacular vocabulary, unpredictable, absorbing, but ultimately unsatisfying.
Janet Barron's co-written screenplays of Clarissa have been nominated for the BA PTA and Royal Television Society awards.
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