Book Review: "Watermark" by Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky is one of the authors I have been exploring more often lately. I do not think I have read anything by him except a poem or two some years ago and one or two books more recently. I have been waiting to read his book “Watermark” for a long while. I was waiting on purpose because of the fact that I love books about traveling in Italy and I did not want to go in an not enjoy the writing style - so I got used to it first.

Brodsky’s writing style is often deep, philosophical, filled with raw human emotion and yet, it does not just capture you by words, but also by style. In incredible style, Joseph Brodsky writes about his second home - Venice. His romantic and often dark book about this stylish city does not have all the romanticisation that you would expect and goes off on long ramblings, essay-like monologues on ideas and poems, literature and culture. It is a brilliant representation of what it is like to be so very alone, but not lonely, in a historical city as beautiful as Venice. It is also one of Joseph Brodsky’s best piece of writing.

Let’s take a look at some of my favourite quotations from the short, but fulfilling text. And trust me, this is one of those books you really do not know until you fully allow yourself to become immersed in Joseph Brodsky’s experience and lifestyle.

“It all felt like arriving in the provinces, in some unknown, insignificant spot - possibly one’s own birthplace - after years of absence. In no small degree did this sensation owe to my own anonymity, to the incongruity of a lone figure on the steps of the stazione: an easy target for oblivion. Also, it was a winter night. And I remembered the opening line of one of Umberto Saba’s poems that I’d translated long before, in a previous incarnation into Russian: ‘In the depths of the wild Adriatic…’ In the depths, I thought, in the boondocks, in a lost corner of the wild Adriatic… Had I simply turned around, I’d have seen the stazione in all its rectangular splendor of neon and urbanity, seen block letters saying Venezia. Yet I didn’t. The sky was full of winter stars, the way it often is in the provinces. At any point, it seemed a dog could bark in the distance, or else you might hear a rooster. With my eyes shut I beheld a tuft of freezing seaweed splayed against a wet, perhaps ice-glazed rock somewhere in the universe, oblivious to its location.”

Now there are few books which describe winter like that. These are some amazing sentences and I can honestly say that if you were to breathe in whilst reading it, you can practically smell the Venetian Winter Air.

“Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty’s existence is that we never know when we are to die. In other words, had life been a solely human affair, one would be issued at birth with a term, or a sentence stating precisely the duration of one’s presence here: the way it is done in prison camps. That this doesn’t happen suggests that the affair is not entirely human; that something we’ve got no idea or control of interferes. That there is an agency which is not subject to our chronology or, for that matter, our sense of virtue. Hence all these attempts to foretell or figure out one’s future, hence one’s reliance on physicians and gypsies which intensifies once we are ill or in trouble, and which is but an attempt at domesticating or demonising the divine.”

I told you, the philosophical ramblings are something extremely beautiful but also incredibly dark and existential. This resonates obviously, with the Renaissance thought of Italy and the new-age enlightenment towards architecture, art and critical theory. Joseph Brodsky is basically trying to get out of his own head whilst disappearing deeper into it and there is not a single better way to disappear into your own consciousness than to be in the middle of one of the most beautiful and vibrant cities in the world whilst also lost, deep and concerned in your own thoughts of existence, religion and how we should all eventually die.