Mark's Rising Tide

Because we know the author, Chris and I were invited to a book launch, the other day.

"A small private party ensued that evening at Arcangelo's wine taverna, in a tiny windowless back room. A few friends and supporters rested on barrels and wooden crates, listening to Arcangelo read a few of his favourite poems and drinking a small inland sea's worth of his best wines. 

To promote the book, over the next few days Michele printed extra copies of one of the poems, which he posted on walls throughout the city, putting them up late at night to avoid the nearly ever-present eyes of the authorities. The poem began: 

Open hearted Venezia  

welcomes a thousand ships

to her bounteous waters 

in a rising tide 

that floods her to the gunnels ... 

Many a man who stood in a campo reading the poem found a knot of marble in his pants at the end, knots that Francesca and her sisters at the bordello spent a lucrative and busy week untying. 

The posting of this lubricious poem led to a rising tide of interest in the book. Predictably, the poem also caught the attention of the more pious members of the local priesthood, and, of course, the Inquisition."

This is an extract from the book we saw launched, set in 18th century Venice, not a description of the event we attended on June 24th, which took place at Pressed, a lively coffee house and bar on Gladstone Avenue. Mark Frutkin, the author, with over a dozen published books to his credit, is no stranger to book launches. In his short speech on this occasion, Mark told us that his elderly mother had wanted to read more about sex in his books, so there we go! This latest one, The Rising Tide, is a sequel to the novel, Fabrizio's Return, which in 2006 won the Trillium Award for best book in Ontario. He read a few pages from his new story aloud (not the extract quoted above) and people wanted to know what happened next, but of course he refused to say, because there was a stack of copies for sale by the door, and we could find out for ourselves if we bought one.

I have my own, signed copies of both above-mentioned novels and have read four other books of Mark's, besides. My favourite is A Message For The Emperor which I have mentioned in this blog before. I appreciate his writing skills, his extraordinary imagination, his sense of humour. Although the date of copyright for The Rising Tide is 2018, he told me he had effectively finished creating this book years ago. It is published by The Porcupine's Quill on beautiful paper, liberally illustrated by engravings of Venetian scenes found in a 19th century book entitled Picturesque Europe.