Italian Hours

Italian Hours

By

2.5
(2 Reviews)
Italian Hours  by Henry James

Published:

1909

Pages:

274

Downloads:

1,681

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Italian Hours

By

2.5
(2 Reviews)

Book Excerpt

roups. They infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the Riva; they hang about the bridges and the doors of the cafés. In saying just now that I was disappointed at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's. The condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a great scandal. The pedlars and commissioners ply their trade--often a very unclean one--at the very door of the temple; they follow you across the threshold, into the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling with each other for customers. There is a great deal of dishonour about St. Mark's altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has become a great bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth.

III

It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had not somehow a great spirit of solemnity within it the traveller would soon have little warrant for regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration of the outer walls, which has lately been s

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This book irritated me in the extreme and I had to give up after 20% after reading the parts about Venice, then some later parts about Milan. To say this book was overly verbose would be an understatement. Reading Henry James is somewhat reminiscent of reading a long-winded Google translation of some prosaic Japanese in English. Almost all direction and meaning is hidden behind a flurry of adjectives and the kind of wishy-washy twaddle that only art critics can concoct. In addition to this, the Kindle version I read omitted all pictures and the HTML tags appeared as {i} tags all over the place. Even if you're a fan of travelogues or Italy in general as I am, chances are you won't enjoy this as I didn't.
"To say this book was overly verbose would be an understatement."

Ah. Welcome to the writing of Henry James. They call his style "figure in the carpet" writing because he would describe EVERYTHING in the setting all the way down to the figure woven into the carpet on the floor.
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