Donna Leon, the much-loved American thriller writer, is often overshadowed by her gallant leading man, Venetian detective Commissario Guido Brunetti. Leon is happy with that, although she has impassioned fans from around the world who visit her hood (and Brunetti’s) in the hope of a sighting. Brunetti walking tours have become a thing in Venice’s tourism calendar.
But her Venetian neighbours have generally been unaware of her profession because she hasn’t allowed Italian translations – to avoid “trouble” and maintain her privacy.
This reserved author, who turned 81 late last month, has now written an account of her life. At just under 200 pages, it’s shorter than her Brunetti books but it’s an elegantly concise survey of a long, busy life, which she claims has been “feckless”. I think she’s brave.
Leon’s episodic narrative is framed in four stages – America, On the Road, Italy, and In the Mountains. Anyone familiar with her novels will recognise the dry Leon wit. The memoir is also unexpectedly bouncy and optimistic in tone.
I met Leon in 2013, when she walked me around her humble district and took me out for a cappuccino at her local cafe, Didovich, opposite the hospital. Sadly, she reports in the memoir that Didovich has changed hands. “The new woman asked if I wanted powdered cocoa on top of my cappuccino. What was this? Starbucks?”
Leon first moved to the exquisite, decaying city in 1981, when she was an English teacher in her late 30s, and she has produced a Brunetti mystery every year since 1992. Her latest, So Shall You Reap, came out earlier this year. Hardly feckless behaviour.
With sorrow, she left Venice in 2015, moving to Switzerland, which is more practical when you’re of a certain age. But she continues to return to Brunetti and Venice regularly, always travelling by train. She enjoys looking out the window as the train zooms past the jammed-up autostrada.
The idea for the memoir grew a few years ago, after a dinner when she caught up with a former colleague from her teaching days in the Iranian city of Isfahan in the late 70s. The foreign teachers were trapped indoors by nightly curfews, caught in the middle of a revolutionary coup. Her friend at the dinner recalled a game they’d played during the curfews and, to the astonishment of the other guests, Leon and her friend started hopping around the room like rabbits. They’d invented this silliness, she writes, to distract from the sound of machine guns and bombs all around them. It was those kinds of memories – including teaching stints in China and Saudi Arabia – that made her realise “that perhaps I had seen and done unusual things”, which made writing a memoir worthwhile.
Her early chapters on her New Jersey family are brief, with oblique references to the Mafia; a happy relationship with her “lunatic” mother; university study which plunged her into the world of literature; and her first discovery of Handel, the composer whose music has elevated her life ever since.
Leon drifted into the teaching jobs, motivated purely by “greed”. Her year-long contract in Saudi Arabia, where she taught English to female students at King Saud University in Riyadh, sounds particularly grim. Upon release, “my spirit sought peace and beauty, and so I moved to the city where those things were most abundantly to be found: Venice”. For some time, she taught English literature at a US Army base about an hour from the city, when many young soldiers joined the military to get a free degree.
Leon does not address the how and why she brought Brunetti into her life – he first appeared in a story she entered in a contest – but she examines her methodology: deep research, observation and a lurid imagination.
The final chapter, “Miss Brill”, named after a Katherine Mansfield story about a woman who realises she is “silly and old”, caught in my throat. Leon, by now established in Switzerland for nearly a decade, has become a gardener, happily pushing lilac sticks into the ground and feeding stray cats.
One day, she has her “Miss Brill” moment when a lady in a shop describes her as “anziana”. Ancient.
She can’t quite believe it. Then, one day in the garden, she kneels down to pick up the hose and can’t get up. “I couldn’t have been more stunned if I’d been struck by lightning.”
But she ends on a jaunty note, determined to try to remain healthy, enjoy the “endless pleasure” of life, and, ideally, spend more time with Brunetti and Handel. “The story of Miss Brill can change,” she writes. I truly hope she is right.
