Oh Most Serene Reublic, you have been betrayed. I have never read Julia Kristeva's efforts at fiction. That said I like the idea of academics pursuing some novelistic muse. I feel Terry Eagleyton's foray onto the field is quite fun https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/188827.Saints_and_Scholars. That said Dr. Martines has ill-served 16th Century Venice with his poorly defined mess. The tale assumes a postmodern guise as a series of collected documents: diairies, dispatches and confessions unfold and overlap. This should be interesting, no? Well it should have been. Instead lengthy tangents on lust and hermetism in cisterns spoil the pudding and that's no punning. I'm sure Dr. Martines wished to illustrate the contradictions of the time between its rhetoric and its divided, unequal reality. It is likely that it is this ambition which kept it from a single star. ( )