Excerpt from Muse by Jonathan Galassi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It was as if he'd farted at the table or mentioned the Holocaust. Brigitta and Matthias stared at each other bug- eyed and sucked in their cheeks, like specters out of Goya's Disasters of War, imagining the digital horde advancing from the West like the latest strain of American influenza. Thank God they would be too old to care when it reached their shores.

Paul shrank down in his seat. What would Homer and Sally say when word reached them, as it assuredly would, that he'd demonstrated once and for all how unsuited he was for this well-padded, backward-looking world?

He couldn't wait to breathe the fetid air of his beloved Venice, where he often escaped after the mind-numbing hothouse of the fair. He washed down the rest of his veal chop with too much syrupy Rotwein, ushered his last guests out of the funereal restaurant, and caught the midnight train with minutes to spare. He arrived in Venice early the next morning, sleepless but jangly with excitement.

He splurged on a water taxi down the Grand Canal, stunned as always to be confronted with how truly strange Venice was. The shut-up palaces fell straight into the oily loden-colored water (what held them up?). The sky alternated between pearlescent and Bellini blue. He felt gusts of enchantment and resistance, elation and revulsion. Venice was a hallucinatory incubus, the most artificial environment in the world: Disneyland for grown-ups. It reeked of sex and its putrescent partner, death. Thomas Mann had caught its rouged, feverish aura perfectly.

What was Ida Perkins, the avatar of red-cheeked American expansiveness and optimism, doing here? This was a place to hide, to fade away—not to grab life by the lapels, as she always had. Had Ida become infected by A.O.'s old man's despondency? Or had she found a new lease on life with Leonello Moro? Was Ida still Ida?

Paul spent the morning wandering, struck yet again by the seemingly chance beauty of Italian public spaces, shaken down over time into nonchalant irregularity and aptness. He had always felt lighter in Italy, unburdened by expectations, his own or anyone else's; he could move at will here, unimpeded and unobserved, as he sometimes could in New York, too, actually, walking anonymous in the noon- time crowd. He had lunch in the autumn sun at a trattoria in the Campo Santo Stefano, and made stabs at resuscitat- ing his dormant Italian. He reread Ida's Venice book, Aria di Giudecca, which was as alive to the decay and incandes- cence of the city as anything he knew ("city of Jewish saints / of cul-de-sacs and feints / of stains and taints"). Then he started leafing through his transcriptions of A.O.'s note- books while he sipped his espresso:

14 june 1987

8:45 caffè latte, pane al cioccolato
10:15 Dr. Giannotti
14:30 computer
15:40 phone call—U.S.
16:20 Debenedetti
17:00 seamstress
20:00 Celine

hair heaven glimmer thread error reflect pillow binding

Seamstress? Why would Arnold see a seamstress? Paul shivered a little as the gathering shadows overtook the afternoon sun. Then he returned to his reading. On Mon- day he was going to meet Ida Perkins. He had lots of questions and he wanted to be prepared.

Excerpted from Muse by Jonathan Galassi. Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Galassi. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.