Skeinspotting

In the Company of the Courtesan

I have just finished this novel. I really enjoyed the setting and I followed the narrative of the main character ( a courtesan's dwarf) avidly, waiting for there to be some sort of major disclosure and some sort of adventure (rather than him running around town getting muscle worn on his little legs) but it never came.

I can't even report any real sauciness considering the subject matter. So, it is an interesting portrait of Venice as a novel but I think it is a less interesting portrait of Venetians as such. Too static and evocative of life drawings with little movement. Perhaps I am just grumpy, I didn't find the book boring, just an anticlimax (ha ha). The courtesan herself was constantly moping around with face lotions on and her gold hair spreading over her shoulders and down her back, just in case we had forgotten about Titian's Venus (although it is on the cover) but nothing developed as far as her character.

And like the student in an exam who has to suddenly speed up the ending and conclude neatly, this did so and for an exhilarating few pages I thought it was really going to.......but then it ended!

Far more sauciness and wet your pants childish giggling was obtained by putting my knitting website through a 'saucy language converter' and then finding that my quaint knitting habits had far more double entendres of a morally dubious nature than i had realised! Has anyone else done the childish but giggle snorting deed yet? Remind me to tell the Anticraft about it. And I wish I could remember what it did to Ruth Paisley's report on Kitchener stitch. Well.....it amused us here for an evening!