The Venetian's Wife

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Nick Bantock, creator of the popular Griffin & Sabine books, applies his
illustrative and evocative skills to an Indian theme in a work rich in
sensual appeal.

Sara Wolfe, a sexually repressed 26-year-old museum employee living in
San Francisco, is receiving e-mail messages from the ghost of a
Renaissance Venetian trader named Niccolo Dei Conti, who persuades her
to help find four Indian artifacts in order to fulfil a promise to his
wife. The cause of Dei Conti’s death in 1469—electricity in the form
of lightning—has given his ghost the power to travel through telephone
wires and to interact with computers and telephones.

The e-mail messages that are exchanged between the two central
characters reveal more and more of Dei Conti’s life half a century
ago. As Sara becomes increasingly exposed to the imagery of Eastern
mythic sexuality, submerged feelings threaten to surface. “I want,”
she tells her computer diary, “to experience full-blooded emo-tion,”
to which the eavesdropping ghost responds, interlinearly, “I like that
expression ‘full-blooded sensation.’ It shows her ripeness. The
stone has been cast and now flies toward its mark.”

Bantock’s illustrations run the gamut from decorative icons and
stamps to the full-bodied eroticism of Indian deities. This book is
lovely to look at, as well as fun to read.