All I can find is one review from amazon.ca Tell me more.
Faces Under Water is the first book in Tanith Lee's recent Secret Books of Venus, a quartet set in a Venice which is, like the Paradys-Paris of her earlier Secret Books of Paradys, just alternate enough to allow her to play with the feel of history without having to worry about names and dates. There is a loose elemental theme, which manifests primarily in the first two books, and a similarly loose arc that only becomes visible in the last book; the first two are my favorites, and Faces Under Water especially. It takes place in what seems to be the early eighteenth century, one year at Carnival. The protagonist, who calls himself Furian Furiano, has run away from his family's wealth to live out a peculiar penance in the slums of the city Venus, drinking when he would rather be sober, sleeping with whores when he would rather be alone, and fishing up bodies from the canals for the aforementioned Doctor Shaachen, who runs a free clinic and studies anatomy from the murdered and the drowned and is popularly rumored to be over two hundred years old, "having sold his soul to Lucefero for knowledge. Probably he was sixty." He is obsessive, distracted, dramatic, cagey in ways that exasperate Furian and so genuinely private that it is not until two-thirds of the way through the book that his first name is mentioned, or the fact that he's Jewish. Through the wings of his magpie, he is associated with the color that permeates the narrative, blue. When he practices alchemy, his patron is the goddess Diana. And while Furian and the woman with whom he becomes infatuated, the blue-eyed, mask-faced Eurydiche, are legitimately at the center of Faces Under Water, the last corner of the plot turns on the nature of Shaachen's conjurings, whether he is only the trumpery doctor of the commedia, or sometimes a magician. He is not at all decorous and he has most of the best lines in the book.
Well, it's not an icon as such, but I'm fond of that drawing.
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Tell me more.
Faces Under Water is the first book in Tanith Lee's recent Secret Books of Venus, a quartet set in a Venice which is, like the Paradys-Paris of her earlier Secret Books of Paradys, just alternate enough to allow her to play with the feel of history without having to worry about names and dates. There is a loose elemental theme, which manifests primarily in the first two books, and a similarly loose arc that only becomes visible in the last book; the first two are my favorites, and Faces Under Water especially. It takes place in what seems to be the early eighteenth century, one year at Carnival. The protagonist, who calls himself Furian Furiano, has run away from his family's wealth to live out a peculiar penance in the slums of the city Venus, drinking when he would rather be sober, sleeping with whores when he would rather be alone, and fishing up bodies from the canals for the aforementioned Doctor Shaachen, who runs a free clinic and studies anatomy from the murdered and the drowned and is popularly rumored to be over two hundred years old, "having sold his soul to Lucefero for knowledge. Probably he was sixty." He is obsessive, distracted, dramatic, cagey in ways that exasperate Furian and so genuinely private that it is not until two-thirds of the way through the book that his first name is mentioned, or the fact that he's Jewish. Through the wings of his magpie, he is associated with the color that permeates the narrative, blue. When he practices alchemy, his patron is the goddess Diana. And while Furian and the woman with whom he becomes infatuated, the blue-eyed, mask-faced Eurydiche, are legitimately at the center of Faces Under Water, the last corner of the plot turns on the nature of Shaachen's conjurings, whether he is only the trumpery doctor of the commedia, or sometimes a magician. He is not at all decorous and he has most of the best lines in the book.
Well, it's not an icon as such, but I'm fond of that drawing.
Yes. And I would like to see it as an icon.