A city’s history captured in its inhabitants’ stories

In the 19th century, authors like Trollope, Zola and Balzac, not content with producing mere novels, created entire sequences of novels (Trollope’s Barsetshire and Palliser series, Zola’s Rougon-Macquart volumes, Balzac’s “La Comedie Humaine”), of which each novel was but a single part, like a star in a constellation.

In our own era of diminished energies and abbreviated attention spans, what we have instead is a kind of miniature version: the collection of linked stories, a mode favored by talents as diverse as the late Harriet Doerr (“Stones for Ibarra,” “Consider This, Senora”) and the promising newcomer Panos Karnezis (“Little Infamies”).

Jane Turner Rylands’ collection, “Venetian Stories,” is an engaging, impressively polished instance of the genre. Rylands, an American who has been living in Venice for the last three decades, has evidently had ample time to absorb the city’s atmosphere and to turn an observant eye on its inhabitants, be they artisan or aristocrat; permanent or transient; Venetian-born or “foreign,” a category that in Venice covers not only people from England and America but also those from other parts of Italy.

This artfully composed book contains 12 stories, whose titles give us some idea of the parameters of Rylands’ enterprise: “Postman,” “Architect,” “Collector,” “Contessa,” “Socialite,” “Mason,” “Visitor,” “Mayor,” “Interpreter,” “Gondolier,” “Lord” and “Mother.” Connections abound; characters who figure in one story will often turn up in another.

With the exception of the postman, the mason, the gondolier and the mother, the characters are generally from the upper class or the upper middle class. Some are wealthy, some have seen better days, and some are discreetly on the make. Most, from the elegant contessa to the dashing, vainglorious, middle-aged gondolier, simply love Venice, although some -- like the postman and his mother, who hail from Naples -- simply can’t stand the place:

“Widow Esposito. Displaced person. That was the story so far.... As she hunkered down on the bench to wait, her soft girth eased comfortably around her so that with her broad, disapproving face, the suggestion of a placid frog belied the tenacity of mind and body that had many times scored over the devils of adversity. She waited with her back to the Grand Canal but turned on purpose to scorn it: spinach water; a common drain; and this was the best that Venice had to offer. Ha. As for living three stories up so you could lean out the window and see a dirty green rio....In Naples it was worth climbing stairs to catch even a glimpse of the great blue bay.”

But among those who love Venice, the reasons for doing so are as various as their social positions and personalities. Contessa Panfili loves the splendors of her native city’s architecture and the orderly serenity of a way of life that she fears is vanishing. For Rocco Zennaro, the mason, “the story of Venice was in its walls. Right from the beginning, tearing down and rebuilding had been as constant and as natural as the seasons, a process carried out by people like himself. He felt a bond with those fellow journeymen, brothers who had performed his same job, in the same place, partitioned only by time. He admired their ancient and accepted practice of reusing old elements in new buildings, of making sure that nothing ever went to waste.”

Rylands writes with playful elegance and a crisp layer of understated wit, that occasionally becomes the predominant flavor of some stories, such as “Socialite”: “That Beauregard van Dongen Bourbon Benson was born in the South was a verifiable fact. And although the Bourbon in his name was a tribute to the inspiration for his conception rather than his lineage, it was no less Southern for that. The source of his family’s wealth was too prosaic to let drop among the demitasse.... His father had started out buying, piecemeal, the failing sugarcane factory where he was employed.”

But in “Postman,” Rylands invokes a grimm kind of irony to portray a man who veils his greed and dishonesty in a cloud of sentimentality to hide his motives not only from others but also from himself. Perhaps the most appealing is “Interpreter,” whose heroine, good-natured, naive Baronessa Bonome, a former simultaneous translator, finds a new field for her interpretative talents when she is befriended first by a musically gifted cat, then a pair of ghosts.

Running like a silver thread through these stories is the recurrent theme of stories per se: the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we concoct to impress others, the gossipy stories by which we try to account for other people’s lives and behavior, and the long-remembered stories that pass into legend and history. Fittingly, through this medium of stories, Rylands has captured a sense of a historic city.