Tag Archives: John Berendt

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by Berendt

by Rebecca

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
by John Berendt
read by Jeff Woodman
written 1994, read 1996

I remember really enjoying this book back when I read it when it was first published but since I recently listed to Brendt’s next book City of Falling Angels, I realized that I couldn’t actually remember any of the actual details about this book, so I should listen to it next. This is his more famous/successful book that got turned into a movie released in 1997, which I also watched for the first time this week.

This book is set in Savannah, Georgia in the 1980s, and it’s very much a story of a time and a place as much as a story of the characters. It’s more or less nonfiction, ie, the people are real and the events are real, but Berendt in his narration plays fast and loose with his own position in the story and exactly what order the events happened in. There’s an extremely idiosyncratic cast of characters and a city that’s caught up in it’s own long history as an old Southern city with an ingrained concept of proper ettiquette, a strict racial divide and only the beginnings of gay pride.

The book is an introduction to a little-known city filled with peculiar but fascinating characters and a culture that’s developed from being caught up in it’s own history, filled with fancy manners, warm welcomes, ingrained exclusions, endemic violence, and ruthless social standards. Some of the main characters include: Joe Odom is an extremely charismatic southern gentleman who is a hub of society despite being a perennial conartist. The Lady Chablis is an extremely beautiful and outgoing black trans showgirl / dragqueen who loves making an impression and leaving chaos in her wake. Jim Williams is a rags-to-riches antique dealer who believes in psychic powers, puts on the most elaborte Christmas parties in the city, and is surprised to be charged with murder when he shoots and kills his much younger, male hustler lover.

To the extent that there’s a plot, the book covers the four trials for murder of Jim Williams, as he’s repeatedly found guilty and appeals. What the truth is, is very much in doubt. What the book tells are the many stories that are recounted, and the many characters who may or may not (and many are not at all) impacted by those cases.

It’s a fascinating and fun book, and I do recommend it, but I also think City of Falling Angels was better.

The movie, on the other hand, was rough: the scriptwriter took a meandering set of character studies and nearly a decade of events and tried to shoe-horn them all into a standard Hollywood plot template complete with romantic secondary plot. While it was full of cameos from the real people playing themselves, it was the professional actors who gave the most wooden performances. It was kind of shockingly bad. It did make me think that the time might be ripe for a remake as a mini-series.

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

by Rebecca

The City of Falling Angels
written by John Berendt
read by Holter Graham
2005

This is a wild ride and a fabulous introduction to a city and a culture that is misleadingly inviting. This is an introduction to Venice, not as a tourist destination or a place of history, but as a location where a number of truly nutty people live and are deeply impacted by the tourists and the history.

The author does an amazing job of writing people who I expect would be extremely annoying in real life as being delightful, and of showing interpersonal conflicts as being multi-sided. He likes people and they open up to him, and thus to the reader, and we get to see an incredibly rich world filled with complicated people and situations.

With a topic as vast as “life in Venice”, Berendt provides a structure around the burning and then rebuilding of La Fenice Opera House. His original planned visit to Venice happened to have him arrive just three days after the famous opera house burnt down, and everyone is talking about it, so it’s a natural discussion point that ties into the justice system and construction and history and art and everyone who happened to live nearby, which meant everyone in Venice, because they’re all interconnected. The book also covers a significant amount of history because in a city like this, every current resident has connections going back generations, from the glass artist who is the twenty-first generation of glass blowers in his family, to the American ex-pats who are referred to that way despite having moved to Venice in the 1890s after a social kerfuffle in Boston high society.

This book is fascinating and delightful. While it feels timely in the way it discusses governmental corruption and personal self-aggrandizement, it also feels remarkably low stakes. It was both interesting and soothing. I highly recommend it.

A special call out to the reader Holter Graham, who did a fabulous job, to the point where I had to double check that it wasn’t the author reading his own story, because he really embodied the first person account. He has an excellent voice for listening to for hours on end, especially after I’d quit a different audio book after just half an hour because I could not listen to the reader.