'To set a memoir in Venice is risky. So bewitching is the lagoon city that it threatens to eclipse other protagonists. Fortunately the British painter Celia Paul is idiosyncratic enough to hold her own.'
'Paul slips seamlessly between ideas about painting, memories, dreams and her current, often tumultuous, feelings. Venice is a charmed landscape for her musings. She makes no attempt to document the city’s material struggles with tides or tourism. Instead, she evokes the ripple of wind on water, bells chiming in a distant campo, her neighbours’ chatter. This is a Venice of the senses: timeless, spellbinding and liberated from 21st-century burdens.
'Yet her experience is no idyll. Her grief for Kupfer is riven with guilt. Freud’s ghost still haunts her. Even after marriage, she “craved unrequitedness” and “continued to harbour infatuations”. ' – Rachel Spence
