You have to get the rhythm of Venice, says the Count, and “the rhythm in Venice is like breathing.” What he means by that is the rise and fall of tides and water pressure. He expands his own theory. He takes in the light (it served Tintoretto and Whistler), its painted quality. After all, is this a city, a plausible city, built on piles as the water rises, or is it just the scarred backdrop in a play about peril, a city that can hardly be mapped, where the stranger must either gain assurance or let himself get lost? (Sometimes it’s a matter of following your nose or some odd, childlike figure in red.) The Count is as arresting as the brass at the start of a Mahler symphony. He’s just three pages, with a knockout exit line. Having shared his theory, he announces: “Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

Aha! You may be realizing we’ve been here before, with John Berendt’s last book—his only other book—Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A decade later (after he’s read at nearly every bookstore in America), he’s chosen Venice as his new Savannah. It’s another port city, with odd characters and a twisted history. We’ll get a crime and a trial, and we’ll be left not quite sure whether we’ve been reading a new form of thriller or a ravishing travel book. Isn’t the strongest pull left after the last page simply the desire to get yourself to Savannah, or Venice, and to be part of the smoke-and-mirrors routine?

Well, be warned: Mr. Berendt is a tricky narrator, a spellbinder but not entirely straightforward. If you remember, the movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—no matter that its director, Clint Eastwood, prides himself on unfussy storytelling—made the most dreadful hash of an intricate book; it was a coarse-grained sieve that couldn’t hold the all-important atmosphere. The City of Falling Angels, I suspect, is a better book, so yes, you may need to alter the way you breathe—and at the same time keep track of the risks of doing so, which seem as obvious as air.

It’s not quite clear whether John Berendt has come to Venice as an author on holiday, a success wandering for fresh material, or as a dangerous man himself, invisible, or anyway indistinct, who’s stirring it all up. There are times when he finds fascinating people who’ll talk to us for a few pages, though we still want the camera to turn to show us Mr. Berendt’s listening face. Is it that of an honest traveler? Or is he a director willing his people to speak their speeches beautifully, yet cryptically enough so that we seldom relax in that summery thing called trust? (And truly, Venice in summer is too much audience.)

Yes, there’s an incident that will lead to a trial—the burning of the Fenice Opera House on the evening of Monday, Jan. 29, 1996, a treasure amid all the other treasures of Venice, a place where five Verdi operas had their premieres. Was the fire the result of negligence or arson? As we begin to realize, flames are all very well—they stay in the memory, they inspire stories and works of art—but accident v. impulse takes you to the very heart of the perplexity of being in Venice. Does human motive rise and fall, just like the tides? Or is it constant, and playful? Or worse?

Not that The City of Falling Angels intends to be anything like as tightly organized as that “thriller” from Savannah. That was a book about a small knot of people, and we knew that even if all of them were lying, some had a darker design. The new book seems at first far more like an anthology of Venetian views and characters, a kind of “People I met while I was thinking about the Fenice fire.” It’s as if The Third Man took time off from wondering about Harry Lime to ask itself where the city of Vienna was keeping its Schiele paintings, how the Prater came to be, and why people of a certain age are inclined to blame “the whole thing” on Vienna. What whole thing? Don’t ask—if you have to ask, start again.

So Mr. Berendt meets glassblowers who’ve blown glass on Murano for generations—and who’ve quarreled just as long. He surveys dark piano nobiles and wonders if they’re rotting, or just waiting for the next ghostly rental. He touches on the uncomfortable story of what happened to the Ezra Pound papers, and Olga Rudge and Jane and Philip Rylands, custodians of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. (Yes, I know they’re real people, real enough to sue—but are they sound?) We learn about an inexplicable suicide. We discover a fierce but very shy lawyer. We meet a man whose special trade is to rid the world of rats, who makes a rat poison for every national culinary taste. We see two dark figures bundle up several hundred of the city’s damnable pigeons in a net. We learn how American money and self-importance meant that the Save Venice foundation split. (That’s a very Venetian story, with two institutions at war in the cause of salvation.)

And all the while, we’re passing the great sites—the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria Della Salute, the Volpi Palace, slipping back and forth, like the vaporetti or like the tides, with the gondolas like sleek coffins. There will be some readers, I fear, who complain that there’s not enough suspenseful organization, that there are too many diverse strands, that it doesn’t quite add up.

It was all I could do to restrain myself from making a winter reservation for Venice. This is not so much a companion for travelers as a book to carry you away. Venice is not large. You could walk it in a day, getting lost and making the most fabulous discoveries, while hearing Verdi and Vivaldi in the slap of the water, and feeling that Milly Theale, Colonel Cantwell or the sickly gaze of Herr von Aschenbach were following you, as you did your best to keep up with that elusive figure in red. I know, I shouldn’t go farther—there are gloomy, wet narrows in Venice that are the black blood of noir. But this is a haunting book, and if you’ve ever had notions of being an angel, or falling, you’ll love it.

By the way, the title comes from a warning posted on the Salute church in the early 70’s, when the occasional plunge of a carved angel promised deliverance to a passer-by.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

You have to get the rhythm of Venice, says the Count, and “the rhythm in Venice is like breathing.” What he means by that is the rise and fall of tides and water pressure. He expands his own theory. He takes in the light (it served Tintoretto and Whistler), its painted quality. After all, is this a city, a plausible city, built on piles as the water rises, or is it just the scarred backdrop in a play about peril, a city that can hardly be mapped, where the stranger must either gain assurance or let himself get lost? (Sometimes it’s a matter of following your nose or some odd, childlike figure in red.) The Count is as arresting as the brass at the start of a Mahler symphony. He’s just three pages, with a knockout exit line. Having shared his theory, he announces: “Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

Aha! You may be realizing we’ve been here before, with John Berendt’s last book—his only other book— Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A decade later (after he’s read at nearly every bookstore in America), he’s chosen Venice as his new Savannah. It’s another port city, with odd characters and a twisted history. We’ll get a crime and a trial, and we’ll be left not quite sure whether we’ve been reading a new form of thriller or a ravishing travel book. Isn’t the strongest pull left after the last page simply the desire to get yourself to Savannah, or Venice, and to be part of the smoke-and-mirrors routine?

Well, be warned: Mr. Berendt is a tricky narrator, a spellbinder but not entirely straightforward. If you remember, the movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—no matter that its director, Clint Eastwood, prides himself on unfussy storytelling—made the most dreadful hash of an intricate book; it was a coarse-grained sieve that couldn’t hold the all-important atmosphere. The City of Falling Angels, I suspect, is a better book, so yes, you may need to alter the way you breathe—and at the same time keep track of the risks of doing so, which seem as obvious as air.

It’s not quite clear whether John Berendt has come to Venice as an author on holiday, a success wandering for fresh material, or as a dangerous man himself, invisible, or anyway indistinct, who’s stirring it all up. There are times when he finds fascinating people who’ll talk to us for a few pages, though we still want the camera to turn to show us Mr. Berendt’s listening face. Is it that of an honest traveler? Or is he a director willing his people to speak their speeches beautifully, yet cryptically enough so that we seldom relax in that summery thing called trust? (And truly, Venice in summer is too much audience.)

Yes, there’s an incident that will lead to a trial—the burning of the Fenice Opera House on the evening of Monday, Jan. 29, 1996, a treasure amid all the other treasures of Venice, a place where five Verdi operas had their premieres. Was the fire the result of negligence or arson? As we begin to realize, flames are all very well—they stay in the memory, they inspire stories and works of art—but accident v. impulse takes you to the very heart of the perplexity of being in Venice. Does human motive rise and fall, just like the tides? Or is it constant, and playful? Or worse?

Not that The City of Falling Angels intends to be anything like as tightly organized as that “thriller” from Savannah. That was a book about a small knot of people, and we knew that even if all of them were lying, some had a darker design. The new book seems at first far more like an anthology of Venetian views and characters, a kind of “People I met while I was thinking about the Fenice fire.” It’s as if The Third Man took time off from wondering about Harry Lime to ask itself where the city of Vienna was keeping its Schiele paintings, how the Prater came to be, and why people of a certain age are inclined to blame “the whole thing” on Vienna. What whole thing? Don’t ask—if you have to ask, start again.

So Mr. Berendt meets glassblowers who’ve blown glass on Murano for generations—and who’ve quarreled just as long. He surveys dark piano nobiles and wonders if they’re rotting, or just waiting for the next ghostly rental. He touches on the uncomfortable story of what happened to the Ezra Pound papers, and Olga Rudge and Jane and Philip Rylands, custodians of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. (Yes, I know they’re real people, real enough to sue—but are they sound?) We learn about an inexplicable suicide. We discover a fierce but very shy lawyer. We meet a man whose special trade is to rid the world of rats, who makes a rat poison for every national culinary taste. We see two dark figures bundle up several hundred of the city’s damnable pigeons in a net. We learn how American money and self-importance meant that the Save Venice foundation split. (That’s a very Venetian story, with two institutions at war in the cause of salvation.)

And all the while, we’re passing the great sites—the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria Della Salute, the Volpi Palace, slipping back and forth, like the vaporetti or like the tides, with the gondolas like sleek coffins. There will be some readers, I fear, who complain that there’s not enough suspenseful organization, that there are too many diverse strands, that it doesn’t quite add up.

It was all I could do to restrain myself from making a winter reservation for Venice. This is not so much a companion for travelers as a book to carry you away. Venice is not large. You could walk it in a day, getting lost and making the most fabulous discoveries, while hearing Verdi and Vivaldi in the slap of the water, and feeling that Milly Theale, Colonel Cantwell or the sickly gaze of Herr von Aschenbach were following you, as you did your best to keep up with that elusive figure in red. I know, I shouldn’t go farther—there are gloomy, wet narrows in Venice that are the black blood of noir. But this is a haunting book, and if you’ve ever had notions of being an angel, or falling, you’ll love it.

By the way, the title comes from a warning posted on the Salute church in the early 70’s, when the occasional plunge of a carved angel promised deliverance to a passer-by.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

The first sign that the Penguin Press is not your run-of-the-mill commercial publisher is the plain-brown-paper catalog cover. (An earlier version of the cover was made of the more typical metallic paper; it was nixed as "too commercial.") Inside, each of the 14 books gets a two-page spread, as opposed to the one-page announcement that many catalogs give most books. Each book cover is shown in black and white (surely, in the flesh, there'll be some color) and otherwise illustrated with sepia photo strips. Nothing flashy here. The message seems to be: "We're Old World-smart and subdued." Penguin Press is the publishing equivalent of shabby chic.

So are the books themselves: all nonfiction except for one novel, The Shadow of the Wind , by Spanish-born Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves. Many are current-affairsy: Ken Auletta's Back Story: Inside the Business of News , Roger Lowenstein's Origins of the Crash . There's only one business book: The Carolina Way , by Dean Smith. And for sentimental value (and upmarket cachet), there's Colored Lights , the collected articles and columns of the late, beloved journalist Michael Kelly. "There's not much fun here," admits one publishing executive who worked for the company at the time the list was being put together. Even the one surefire best-seller in this history-obsessed age, Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, is pitched as serious homework and makes barely any mention of the sexual scandals that plagued the founding father. That all the authors here are male is probably coincidental-"for reasons more cosmic than practical," as Ms. Godoff says in her letter at the front of the catalog-but it's striking that they come mainly via three of the toniest agencies: Melanie Jackson, the Wylie Agency and I.C.M. (Noted nonfiction agent Kathy Robbins has one book on the list, as does Thomas Colchie, who represents virtually all of the literary Latin American books published in this country.) To further the sense of upmarketness-and, not incidentally, to fill out what would be a thin catalog-Ms. Godoff also publishes excerpts from all the featured books. This is super-serious stuff: "A bunch of books for serious readers!" it fairly screams. It's almost as if Ms. Godoff-who, for all the accusations of literariness, published such crowd-pleasers as Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation books and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -has taken to heart what both her critics and fans have said. She's a serious publisher, goddammit! She'll leave the fluff to the other guys.

And yet … there's a self-consciousness about this catalog, this list, that makes you root for it. First of all, there's that letter in the front. While it's not unusual for an imprint founder to introduce herself and her list to journalists and booksellers, the tone here is an endearing combination of feisty and defensive. "It's back to old-fashioned publishing for the brand-new Penguin Press," writes the woman who fell afoul of the newfangled variety. But then she backtracks. "If you build it, will they come?" she asks plaintively. "Knock wood." And, as if to thwart speculation about what will come next, the publisher includes a list of authors whose books are forthcoming from Penguin Press. Never mind that the naysayers point to the former Godoffites who aren't there-Zadie Smith, Adam Gopnik-the to-be-published list is pretty impressive and a lot more varied. It includes John Berendt (which puts to rest rumors that he would stay at Random House) as well as Hendrik Hertzberg, David Nasaw, Michael Pollan, Alexandra ( Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight ) Fuller, and food mavens Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters. Could it be that, over time, Ms. Godoff will build the kind of rich and varied list that made her the star she was for so many years at Random House? Nobody at her old shop wants to talk about it, naturally, and Ms. Godoff, as is her wont, declined to be interviewed for this article. Apparently, she believes that the books speak for her, and for themselves.

Then again, she's already said it, and I'm just repeating: "Knock wood."

Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time , published by Putnam, a division of Penguin (USA), is in bookstores now.

Take the widely publicized Lady Chablis … please. There is too much and not enough of her in the movie, whereas in the book, she was allowed to be devastatingly and subversively sassy even beyond the bounds of political correctness. But at her first entrance in the movie, some sharp-eyed buffs may be tempted to shout "Crying Game" or perhaps even "Crying Shame" at the supposed ability of the black drag-queen performance artist known on and off the screen as Lady Chablis to "fool" John Cusack's John Kelso until she/he reveals that her first initial F. stands for Frank.

Kelso is the movie's fleshed-out version of the book's John Berendt, a shadowy, neutral, even neutered, New York journalist-author-narrator-observer. One doubts that Mr. Berendt would have been fooled by Lady Chablis for an instant even if he hadn't spotted Jaye Davidson's telltale Adam's apple in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992). Curiously, Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Hancock have chosen not to employ narration for a project that virtually screams for it. Instead, they add a frantically perfunctory love interest between Kelso and Mandy Nichols (Alison Eastwood), a local chantoozie who, in the book, was a handsomely huge woman in whom the book's Mr. Berendt never showed the slightest romantic interest.

Still, I would not go so far as to say that Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil should never have been made into a movie, or that Mr. Eastwood was necessarily the wrong director for this project. Certainly the presence in the cast of Kevin Spacey as Jim Williams, the closest thing we have to a protagonist, and Jude Law as Billy Hanson, Williams' live-in lover, gives us the opportunity to keep up with the careers of two of the most spectacularly talented youngish character actors in the contemporary cinema. Mr. Hancock would have been well advised to turn Mr. Berendt's book inside out, perhaps with a convoluted flashback strategy, or with a mystery that would enable us to unveil the beauties and eccentricities of Savannah bit by bit, as organic parts of the narrative. But Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Hancock had to contend not only with Mr. Berendt, who would have been justifiably miffed at such a radical transformation of his book, but also with the reportedly 2 million-plus readers of the book who would have cursed Mr. Eastwood for tampering with their beloved snob and tourist values.

Yet even here, the movie shortchanges the book by not allowing Jim Williams- antique dealer, collector, restoration specialist, self-made millionaire and murderer-to unfold sufficiently, with his witty, cynical, wondrously wise and common-sensical observations on everything and everyone around him. Similarly, Billy Hanson, the murder victim, is never given his due as a sensual magnet for both sexes in every stratum of Savannah society. My job, however, is not to speculate on what might have been, but to describe and evaluate what I myself experienced when I saw the movie. I must regretfully report that I was bored to stupefaction through much of the running time. The voodoo stuff was done much better in Eve's Bayou , and the courtroom scenes labored for shock effects that fizzled. Forget the fact that the four trials in the book were compressed into one suspenseless proceeding in the movie.

As I sensed the restiveness of the audience, I realized that many viewers were undecided about whether to laugh out loud, chuckle, smirk, or just snicker at the grotesques paraded before them and the ostensibly wide-eyed Kelso. Both the book and the movie make it a capital offense even to be suspected of racism, homophobia and unkindness to old rich women with blue hair. Yet both Kelso and Mr. Berendt are so detached from all the gossipy animals in the Savannah zoo that one never feels any genuine warmth or affection for these creatures.

I Endured Sick

So You Don't Have To

Speaking of freaks, and that seems like all I am going to be speaking of this week, Kirby Dick's Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist is a movie I am glad I saw, but I don't ever want to look at it again, and thus I cannot recommend it in all good conscience to my readers, which is not to say that I question the raves it received from several of my colleagues. I was not familiar with Flanagan's life, career and medical condition before I saw Sick , and, though I am not turned on by the prospect of enduring excruciating pain, I found Sick something of a revelation, though less artistically than existentially.

Look at me, God, he seems to be saying. Look at what You've done to my body with Your degenerative disease cystic fibrosis. You've ravaged me physically, but You haven't broken my spirit. As badly as You have mutilated me, I am going to mutilate myself in ways that You've never imagined in Your wildest sadistic dreams. The pain that You and I have inflicted on me shall be the subject of my performance art. I defy You, God.

And so Flanagan did until he died of his disease in 1996 at the age of 43, an unusually long life span for a victim of the illness. Flanagan collaborated enthusiastically with Mr. Dick on the documentary, to the point of creating several new performances just for the film. He was aided by Sheree Rose, described in the production notes as "his longtime partner, collaborator and dominatrix." She also recorded much of their life together.

There is in Flanagan's metaphysical posture something of Molière's Don Juan and John Milton's Satan. Yet is there not something in Christianity itself, even in Christ Himself, that is defined by willful brutalization of the flesh? Is there a deeper sexual sadomasochistic subtext to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian or the Crucifixion itself? I was brought up with a God of pain and suffering, sin and guilt. Even today, I can't help regarding the hedonistic side of my nature as something shamefully secular.

But I can't endorse self-mutilation as edifying cinematic spectacle. Flanagan has succeeded in shocking me from beyond the grave through the death-defying medium of the motion picture. Awesome, yes, but truly sick also. Anyway, don't say I didn't warn you. I would not rest easy if I inflicted Sick on any of my readers outside the S&M culture with the alibi of art. Art it is not, but a bizarre display of raw existence it certainly is.

Bean Doesn't Translate,

Not Even in Dollars

Mel Smith's Bean , from a screenplay by Richard Curtis and Robin Driscoll, based on a character devised by Rowan Atkinson and Mr. Curtis, has grossed more than $100 million abroad even before opening in the United States. I had never seen Mr. Atkinson's prior characterizations of the bumbling character Bean on PBS and American cable stations. I vaguely remember Mr. Atkinson as the tongue-tied cleric in Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), but I don't remember guffawing as loudly as other people claim to have done at the time. But, hey, what did I have to lose?

If I can't review him as a comic genius, I could revile him as a symptom of the decline and fall of screen comedy in our time. The noontime screening at my local theater had a fair share of parents and children-mostly fathers and sons, actually-and so I quietly turned on my audience-research laugh meter, particularly for the children who, as a tribe, have their guilt-ridden fathers eating out of their (the children's) hands.

And there he was, Rowan Atkinson as Bean, one of the ugliest-looking men I have ever seen outside of a hospital for the terminally disfigured. Not only does Bean fail to realize how bad-looking he is; he persists in scrunching up his face to look even uglier. There is a touch of genius in that particular comic strategy, with its rejection of sympathy and pity. The movie itself, with its feeble spoof of art museums and scholars, was paper-thin, but Mr. Atkinson did generate some laughs with a series of sketchlike skits thrown together for a feature-length movie.

The Bean persona has been described as a combination of Pee-wee Herman and Jacques Tati. I suspect that Mr. Atkinson has considerable, if anachronistic, gifts as a farceur and is best taken in small doses, but, hey, a hundred mil is a hundred mil. Peter MacNicol and Pamela Reed earned my admiration for their poise under the fire of Bean's baleful expressions.