SOURCE: "In the Mobile Labyrinth," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4700, April 30, 1993, pp. 12-13.

In the following excerpt from a comparative review of Brodsky's Watermark, Tony Tanner's Venice Desired, and Christopher Prendergast's Paris and the Nineteenth Century, Bowie praises Brodsky's unconventional depiction of Venice.

[Joseph Brodsky's Watermark] …, which is not only an autobiographical essay but at moments a novella and a collection of epigrams, is cast as an irreverent riposte to the Venetian outpourings of the writers studied by Tony Tanner [in his Venice Desired]. How sumptuous and over-ripe Brodsky's spare notations make them all seem in their anxious quests for meaning. Even their negative epiphanies are impossibly fulsome when set against the street-corner incidents or failures of incident by which the nomadic poet measures out his Venetian winters. Speaking of his first arrival in Venice, he dissociates himself from the swollen ambitions of his predecessors: "If that...