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79 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Leon's 'Question' has the answers: a great read!, April 22, 2010
Venice this summer has been hotter than blazes, hotter than Hades, hotter than Dante's inner circles and what must a police commasario to do to get out of the city for a vacation sure to be a cool respite from all the law and order stuff he deals with year-round?
For Donna Leon's inimitable Guido Brunetti it seems the summer's heat is interminable but there's a light (a cool breeze?) just ahead--a vacation to the Alps to cool things off. At least that's what he's hoping. "Not only was it too hot to think about crossing the city to go home for lunch; it was too hot to think about eating."
Alas, in Ms Leon's 19th Brunetti case, "A Question of Belief," this is not to be.
While Brunetti and all of Venice may be suffering from the summer's heat, Leon's readers find this latest installment in a very successful series to be just what the doctor (or policeman) ordered: Leon at her best. A taut, tersely written tale that reaffirms our faith in this very popular author, whose talents and abilities in this genre keep producing winners!
Before Brunetti can take this family on vacation, needless to say, a murder is announced, to quote Miss Marple.
And, as usual with the Leon series, subplots support the storyline quite smartly. Inspector Vianello's aunt in mixed up with a charlatan horoscope guru; a corrupt judicial system is wrecking continued havoc and injustice as some judges become suspect; and the ramifications of the central murder are ever-widening. As usual Leon touches upon important social issues (the environment, illegal immigration, the country's governmental and financial corruptions) and blends these into her narrative cleverly and smoothly, never detracting from the bigger picture: who done it and how are we going to make the arrest?
Crime, Brunetti says, is usually reduced to money, money, money or sex, sex, sex, with Greed playing the major role. As Brunetti's friend Brusca tells him, as he's revealing details about the judicial system's "irregularities": "It's strange. We think that love of music can run in families, or maybe the ability to paint. So why not greed?" And greed it is.
Then when the murder occurs, an official within the court system, there are more complications. An enigmatic, totally dedicated civil servant Araldo Fontana is found bludgeoned to death in the courtyard of his apartment building. It is left up to the incorruptible Brunetti and his team to work through the maze of misinformation, disinformation, lies, deceit, cover-up, and even a couple of red herrings. Along the way, Leon's set of the "usual suspects" are there to impede the progress and these include his boss Vice-Questore Patta and the ever-pugnacious Lt. Scarpa. And, it seems, an indictment of the entire Italian bureaucracy. As Leon says, "It was seldom, after all these years, that Brunetti could be moved to indignation by some new revelation of the skill with which his fellow citizens managed to slip around the edges of the law. In some instances...he felt grudging admiration for the ingenuity employed...." This isn't to say that he ever gives up, which is the appeal of his character, alongside his intellect, his tolerance, and a fine sense of humor.
Brunetti, as always, is finely supported by his wife Paola and his two children, and none of the Leon books would be complete without Signorina Elettra, the most able office manager in the Questura, whose knowledge of the computer and the Internet--and what she can do with them--make her invaluable. But she's more than this. A character who holds her own, she notes that "A man without a sense of fashion is a man without a soul." Brunetti, moralist that he is, moves to subscribe to Signorina Elettra's philosophy: that "dishonesty is in proportion to how much trust you are betraying, not to the lie you actually tell." Brunetti throughout his career has felt it necessary to work in shades of gray and not black and white.
Leon's theories about motive (greed, love, money, sex) come to fruition all in good time. One of the many pluses of her writings is the fact that she's not afraid to confront such issues in Italy (She told me in London a couple of years ago that her books weren't translated into Italian, perhaps for good reason!). A resident of Venice (where she's live for 25 years), she clearly has a literary love relationship with the city, even the country, and does not appear to falter in being willing to show these shortcomings. And while she doesn't hesitate to get "involved," her novels never falter in their effectiveness, their readability, their pursuit of what's inherently right. It's such a pleasure to read Donna Leon.
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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
In which Brunetti makes the case against visiting Venice in a heatwave., April 26, 2010
It's always a day brightener for me when Commissario Guido Brunetti & crew come for their annual visit. This 19th in the series is no exception, though not among my favorites. It's more about the miseries of living through a Venetian heatwave--and Leon does a masterful job of making us feel every muggy sweaty miserable degree of it--than it is about solving crimes and sharing the joys, quibbles and fabulous meals of Brunetti's family life.
This time Paola and the kids are away cooling off in the mountains and, of Paola's parents, only her mother makes an appearance, and a brief one at that. Which leaves this story pretty much to Brunetti, Ispettore Vianello and Signorina Elettra, with Patta contributing a couple of notable temper tantrums. As always, there are two cases. The major one centers on the murder of a gay civil servant who may or may not have been in cahoots with a bent judge; the secondary case involves a phony psychic who's bilking old ladies, among them Vianello's aunt. The story moves at a pace befitting enervating heat until, suddenly, we're only a few pages from the end and nothing's been solved and no one's been arrested. The end then comes quickly and is somewhat less than satisfying. I found myself wondering if Leon was herself nearly done in by a heatwave while writing this.
Because the lives of the characters in a Leon novel are as important to the stories as the crime solving, I always recommend reading her novels in as close to chronological order as you can get. Here's the list as of March 2011: "Death at La Fenice," "Death in a Strange Country" "Dressed for Death," "Death and Judgment," "Acqua Alta," "Quietly in Their Sleep," "A Noble Radiance, " "Fatal Remedies," "Friends in High Places," "A Sea of Troubles," "Wilful Behavior," "Uniform Justice," "Doctored Evidence," "Blood from a Stone," "Through a Glass, Darkly" "Suffer the Little Children," "The Girl of His Dreams," "About Face," "A Question of Belief" and "Drawing Conclusions." (Please note: Should you ever come across "The Anonymous Venetian," "A Venetian Reckoning" or "The Death of Faith" know that these are not new Leons; they're just British versions of "Dressed for Death," "Death and Judgment" and "Quietly in Their Sleep.")
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"We pass through centuries, and we learn nothing." Guido Brunetti, p 234, May 14, 2010
"seamlessly blending straightforward descriptions of events, pointed moral lessons, and tightly-focused dramatic accounts, his historiography contains deep, and often pessimistic, insights into the workings of the human mind and the nature of power." Wikipedia on the historical writings of Publius Cornelius Tacitus.
Guido Brunetti -- whose austere view of Italian life, both public and private, underpins this remarkable series -- is reading Tacitus rather than Russian history. His books on Russian history are in the mountains with his vacationing family, while Brunetti swelters around Venice, returning home with a pizza to eat on his terrace "while drinking two beers and reading Tacitus, the bleakness of whose vision of politics was the only thing he could tolerate in this current state." (201)
As the Wikipedia quote suggests (oh come on, tell me you don't short-cut with it) Tacitus manages clarity of narrative and psychological insight while delivering a moral lesson.
So, too, does Donna Leon.
As other reviewers note, most of the loving and entertaining scenes of Brunetti/Falier family life are missing from this book. There are no luscious meals detailed from shopping through prep work, from serving to savoring, from second-helpings to dishwashing. Figs and prosciutto are all we get, and briefly. And yet it is faith in that family-life which constitutes the center holding Brunetti's cosmos intact. Early in the book we hear a shockingly frank rant from Paola about the power of belief over reason. Sparked by the sight of Brunetti's proposed reading on the Russian Revolution, Paola denounces her youthful political ideals in the most brutal yet of her recent self-fashionings:
"To think that I voted Communist. Of my own free will, I voted for them. . . . You know me well enough to know I'm not much for shame or guilt, but I will forever feel guilty that I voted for those people, that I refused to listen to common sense to believe what I didn't want to believe."
Brunetti tries to comfort: "They never had any real power here."
Paola refuses to shelter in that argument: "I'm not talking about them, Guido; I'm talking about me. That I could have been so stupid and have been so stupid for so long."
There is the heart of this narrative, the failure of reason in the face of the desire to believe. The two plots both arise from this moral and intellectual battle, but the third element of the novel - Brunetti's reading - is more obscure than in other of Leon's books.
Looking at the title, I assumed he would be reading Plato. Turning the early pages, seeing Leon set up a series of ethical dilemmas involving the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, I looked in vain for mention of The Republic.
But Leon is more subtle than that. The sad deceptions we find here - card-readers duping wealthy women, greedy contractors subverting the judicial system, Patta's relentless fetishizing of appearance over reality - aren't worthy of the grandeur of Plato's vision. So Brunetti reads a Roman who critiques Plato and we get devastation at one remove.
Donna Leon's novels offer us many things: glimpses into the lives of the people who actually live in Venice, a complex view of the modern family, the politics of life in a bureaucracy, the architecture of loving friendships. Here she raises the stakes by asking about the nature of reality. How do we know if our desire to know truth leads us to the light of faith -- intellect -- or to the shadow on the cave wall that is belief?
This isn't a beach read, but it would make an excellent airplane book, allowing the reader to follow all of the nuanced plot lines without interruption. I teach a murder mystery class every other Spring semester and this term I taught About Face. While the kids liked the setting and the politics and the family life, they didn't much like the reading that all the characters do. "Too much thinking," they complained. They would like this book even less, at least while they are undergrads. But they will return to the series later in life, at once more jaded and more hopeful, and find it entirely wonderful.
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