Friday, July 29, 2011

Virtually in Venice, living vicariously...

Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti police detective series.
[Note: I started this blogpost months ago, and it got interrupted. Here it is at last - ]
I spent most of the Easter holiday break in Venice. Unfortunately, this experience has been entirely virtual, and my body has remained in New Zealand. The imaginative journey has been intense, however. I have stood at bars and ordered cafe corretto and tramezzini, I have leant on the railing of the Rialto at midnight, I have gazed at length on the Venetian skyline, taken the vaporetto to la Giudecca and the Lido, lunched at Murano and watched the glass makers...
I can’t even remember how I found Donna Leon’s crime series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. I think it came up in the recommendations on my Kindle. The Italian name of the police officer caught my attention because I speak Italian and have lived in Italy. Once I read the blurb and saw that the series was set in Venice I was lost.  If you have ever been to Venice you either love or hate it; I have been there several times, and I love it. My next thought was to wonder if the books had been translated into Italian. It would be fun to go to Venice in the correct language. Well, in Italian, anyway - I can attest from personal experience that Venetian dialect is incomprehensible to outsiders. 
I looked the author up on Wikipedia and found that she is a 70 year old American who has been living in the Veneto for twenty five years. She taught English Literature at the American Base in Vicenza but is now retired and spends her time writing and on music, particularly Baroque music. As an English teacher and choral singer who loves Baroque music I was warming to this writer already! 
I was intrigued to read that Donna Leon’s novels have been translated into 23 languages, but not Italian, by express wish of the author.  Apparently conspiracy theories regarding this abound, the Italians conjecturing that the only motive for this must be that she has written such damning condemnations of them and their national pysche that she is ashamed and afraid to have them translated. I was rather charmed to discover her rationale that she is famous enough already and that she has to live there. You can read about this here in an Anchor Publisher’s interview [http://italian-mysteries.com/leon-interview.html#Anchor-Publishers-23240] she gave. Her attitude made me laugh and almost made up for my disappointment that I would have to read them in English. I also checked out the Wikipedia entry on her at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Leon 
The next step was to copy the reading order for the series into the notes on my iPhone. (I should explain that I am one of those people who insists on reading a series in the correct order, which also explains why I end up buying so many of them: I can’t stand the way the one I want next is never in the library when I want to read it.) I fired up my Kindle to download the first book and encountered one of those inexplicably bizarre inconsistencies which seem to afflict the world of Kindle Asia-Pacific. All of the 20 book series are available for purchase on Kindle, except numbers 1, 3 and 4. I have ceased to wonder why. These things are a mystery. I shrugged mentally and downloaded number 2 - after all, if they turned out not to be very good, what difference could it make that I started with the second one... and the rest, amici, is storia (history).
I emerged 20 books later (3 from the library). I suppose I did actually sleep, eat, go on holiday and perhaps even communicate with my long-suffering partner occasionally, but it feels like I have been in Italy for two weeks, at the elbow of Guido Brunetti. His intelligent, sometimes despairing navigation through the wastelands of Italian bureaucracy, corruption and even brushes with the Mafia, has been a delight. His interchanges with his boss and the way he manipulates his obtuse superior make me laugh out loud.
His family life is mostly convincing and entertaining, though I find it incredible that his wife  the English Professor seems to desire nothing better than to cook him sumptuous meals when she is not reading or lecturing. Perhaps this is simply because I hate cooking and would rather read a book any day. Perhaps it is just despair at Italian gender politics. The novel in which his wife decides to commit a crime of vandalism over a political issue is, frankly, the least credible portrayal of her character throughout the series. The smartest person in the police force is Signorina Elettra, who is nominally his boss’s secretary and is not actually a police officer: her computer hacking skills (while not quite in the class of the girl with the dragon tattoos) are legend. But the gender politics, though occasionally frustrating, are true to life; life in Italy as I experienced it, anyway.
As for the mysteries themselves, they are intelligent and well-written.  For me, the delight is in the setting and the characterisation.  I am just looking at that sentence with disbelief. This is the person who values the ideas and the people above all else: I have always been one to skim over the descriptive passages irritably, going, ‘Yada, yada, get on with the story.’  I think this is why I fell in love with this series - it has been, for me, a unique reading experience. I have never before felt such a connection with the ambience of a novel, not even in homegrown NZ literature. 
Go and read them, and enjoy them slowly, like a good caffe lungo in the sun in the piazza...