The Aspern Papers by Henry James (1888)

I don't know why it happened that on this occasion I was more than ever struck with the queer air of sociability, of courtship and family life, which makes up half the expression of Venice.  Without streets and vehicles, the uproar of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an immense collective apartment, in which Piazzo San Marco is the most ornamented corner, and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses of decoration.
---Henry James, The Aspern Papers, 1888

It seems that not many people are reading Henry James today:  is he found to be outdated, irrelevant or just too slow.  He has written some of the most intelligent works about Americans and their relationship to Europe, but perhaps many people today don't care about American and Europe in the 19th C., no matter how much one can gain an historical perspective therein.  Also, the art of reading fiction in general seems disappearing.  The Aspern Papers was originally published in serial form in The Atlantic, a publication that gave up publishing fiction in 2005. I first read Nabokov in Playboy in the sixties, though I doubt that they, or anyone other than The New Yorker, publish any serious fiction these days. I recommend The Aspern Papers, a short novel (novella?) to those who want to try Henry James's exquisite style without venturing to the longer novels.  It has a simple plot and few characters, one of the main characters, in a way, being the city of Venice, Italy.  A writer is trying, by hook or by crook, to get access to the papers of a great poet, Jeffrey Aspern, rumored to be in the possession of an elderly lover of the deceased poet and her niece.  The old woman dies and the niece says she will give the narrator the papers if he will marry her.  He hesitates and the niece burns the papers.

Not much else happens in the book, as the unnamed narrator travels in and about Venice and thinks things over and tries to come up with schemes to get access to the papers, even paying an outrageous sum to live with the old woman and her niece, who never venture out of their home.  The writing is precise and detailed, as the narrator muses on Aspern and travels about Venice.  He ends up with a small portrait of Jeffrey Aspern and says "When look at it I can scarcely bear my loss -- I mean of the precious papers."