Venusberg by Anthony Powell (Little, Brown & Co., no date* [1952, 1965])
A darkly comic and elegantly chilly novel about a young British journalist who travels to a small unnamed Baltic country as a foreign correspondent shortly after WWII. The community he finds himself in consists almost entirely of diplomats (and exiled Russian nobility). He falls in with a rather aimless and indolent lot and begins an affair with a charismatic and wealthy native who is married to a much older stoic professor. Not much happens, but Powell writes with an almost brutal asperity and lack of sentimentality, and the result is refreshing and bracing. There’s a flavor of Evelyn Waugh — the black comedy masking something deeper and darker, and a cool, clear-sightedness and understated flippancy.
Our hero’s name is Lushington; his mistress is Ortrud; his friend at the British Embassy is DaCosta. I enjoyed reading this book very much.
*Interestingly, the book was first published in the United States in 1952 by the Periscope Bookshop and the Holliday Bookshop. The unsold stock was taken over by Little Brown in 1963 after they became Powell’s American publishers. Little Brown reissued the book with a new spine label and price label to the flap in 1965.
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