Ecco by Ronald Sukenick
"Ecco" by Ronald Sukenick is a novel set in the enchanting city of Venice, where the narrator, a writer, experiences a profound sense of both visibility and invisibility. Awakening in Venice, he relishes the freedom from being a tourist or a local, yet grapples with personal losses, including divorce and death, which have exacerbated his feelings of isolation. The narrative unfolds through his observations of the city and his introspective musings about his past, particularly his first visit to Venice decades earlier, marked by an eye injury and a pivotal encounter with a generous stranger.
As the narrator interacts with various characters, notably a young man and his wife, he becomes increasingly aware of the spiritual and temporal dimensions of the city. The narrative weaves together themes of memory, identity, and the passage of time, as the narrator grapples with his own existence and the echoes of his past. Through magical realism, Sukenick explores complex relationships and the interconnectedness of experiences, culminating in moments of uncanny coincidence that blur the lines between reality and imagination. "Ecco" invites readers to reflect on their own journeys, the nature of perception, and the transient quality of human connections.
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Ecco by Ronald Sukenick
First published: 1990
Type of plot: Magical Realism
Time of work: The late twentieth century
Locale: Venice, Italy
Principal Characters:
The narrator , a successful writerA young man , a fledgling writerA young woman , his wife
The Story
The narrator awakens in Venice, pleased to be there with enough money to do whatever he wants. Happy to be neither a tourist nor a Venetian, he feels invisible. However, his invisibility—the consequence of his profession as a writer—has been exacerbated by recent events: deaths, divorce, and geographical circumstances. He is, in fact, in Venice alone, hoping to recuperate from his losses. His observations of activity in the city (usually made parenthetically) alternate with his narrative about his own activities.
As a water taxi goes by, the narrator goes to a blind shoemaker to collect his shoes. Only after three visits are the shoes finally ready, as the shoemaker has a different sense of time, one that is of another world. The narrator decides that Venice is as concerned with the spiritual as it is with the practical.
One day he wanders into the Hotel Falier (pronounced like "failure" in English). He sees a thin young man with black hair and green eyes trying to collect a refund on his reservation so that he can move to a less expensive youth hostel. Seeing this exchange makes the narrator recall his own first visit to Venice almost thirty years earlier. Arriving by train with an eye injury, he had no money to pay for medical attention. A young New Zealander at the youth hostel lent him the money to see a doctor. When the doctor removed a locomotive cinder from the narrator's eye, he cried, "Ecco!"—which is how the narrator learned the Italian term for "Here it is!"
The next day the narrator visits the Jewish ghetto that was established in the sixteenth century. He again sees the young man from the Hotel Falier and feels inexplicably attracted to him; his presence is somehow evocative. After leaving the synagogue, the narrator suddenly finds himself back inside it. How? It is not that he has lost his way, he thinks, "It's that a certain period of duration has disappeared, unaccounted for, during which you were transported back here in a wink of time, and you are not so much back where you started as back when you started and it occurs to you that the real meaning of labyrinth is time warp."
The next day, he again sees the boy, who is viewing paintings by Tintoretto at the Scuola San Rocco. Although the narrator is no longer surprised by these chance encounters, his curiosity about the boy so intensifies that he finally speaks to him. However, the boy—or young man, for his age is not clear—looks through him so absolutely that the narrator wonders if he himself is visible, or if the young man is staring into another spiritual dimension. Venice is, after all, a spiritual city and a timeless one whose waters offer a reflecting pool in which travelers may reflect.
When he sees the boy again a few days later, this time the boy is with a young brunette woman. The next day he meets the woman and learns that she is an artist and the young man, her husband, is an unpublished writer. It is her first visit to Venice; her husband was here once before, but he then had some kind of eye trouble that kept him from seeing everything that he wanted to see. The narrator mentions that he paid his second visit to Venice with his former wife. He turns to speak to the young woman but finds that she has disappeared in a wink of time.
Later at a café, the narrator sees a lively senior citizen whom he wistfully envisions as his future self. He also remembers having been in just such a café with his young wife in happier times, when he saw himself as a successful writer twenty years in the future. Remembering who one was going to be helps one to remember who one is.
In the narrator's last encounter with the young man and his wife, he overhears them celebrating the publication of his first story. The title of the story is the same as one of the narrator's own stories. The young man is also telling his wife about his first visit to Venice, when he had a locomotive cinder removed from his eye. Disturbed by these coincidences, the narrator tries to speak to the couple but realizes that they cannot hear him. He approaches their table, desperately trying to communicate. The young man suddenly stares into space, paling as if he sees a phantom. He looks the narrator in the eyes, dropping his glass in fright. When his wife asks what has happened, he replies, "I just dreamed I saw myself twenty years from now." The narrator now understands his own invisibility as the young man miraculously disappears into passing time.