... I am feckless and unthinking by nature and have never planned more than the first step in anything I've done.
Donna Leon, Wandering through Life
Mostly this book, a very readable one, is a collection of personal essays about her life when she is not writing. As the title suggests, her long life — she is now in her 80s — has been mostly one of aimless wandering from one thing to another, from one country to another. She spent periods as an English instructor in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Her life changed when she took a job teaching English at an army base near Venice. She fell in love with the city. How that love affair led to her mystery series she doesn't bother to tell us.
Leon, born and raised in New Jersey and without a drop of Italian blood, has long had a passion for opera and the music of Handel. She devotes one chapter to her interest in bees, which she was able to work into the plot of her novel Earthly Remains, the only one of her novels she mentions. There's another chapter about a cat named Tigger.
Several chapters relive her childhood — Halloween memories, her first day of school, one particular Christmas turkey. She has one chapter called "Drugs, Sex, and Rock 'n' Roll" that hardly mentions any of the three. Other people are the ones who took the drugs — and apparently had the sex. There is no mention of a significant other.
While in Saudi Arabia she helped develop a game based on Monopoly that she called Saudiopoly. She and other Americans there played it in secret until they could finally leave the country.
Leon wanders through this book the way she has wandered through life. It makes fine reading, but readers of her Brunetti novels will probably not enjoy it any more than anyone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment