Irony and wit – you know that from Donna Leon when she sends her Commissario Brunetti to hunt criminals in Venice. Now she presents stories about her life – and the irony just sparkles.
Crime writer Donna Leon hopping across the floor like a rabbit at a slumber party? Or how she silently escapes from spies? Donna Leon even a shoplifter? Everything was there, but whether it was real or imaginary – the author likes to remain vague in her new book.
You will probably never find out the ultimate truth from the inventor of Commissario Brunetti from Venice. In “A Life in Stories”, Leon reveals what her ironic humor and dealing with the truth is all about.
She describes her mother as a woman with an unusual sense of humor and a penchant for the absurd: “I’m afraid we inherited from her the generous use of truth.” Leon chats about her experiences in the US, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy and Switzerland. Some stories have already appeared as articles, almost a quarter are new. The book will be out on August 24th, a good month before her 80th birthday (September 28th, 2022).
Their minds always revolve around crime
In one episode, she tells how she keeps toying with the idea of layering several cashmere sweaters and slipping away in fashion boutiques in Venice. As a crime writer, it’s normal for her thoughts to always revolve around crime, she writes mischievously. Theft reports against Leon are not known. One can only conclude that she either indulges in such lusts in her imagination or is a cunning thief who never gets caught. Leon would be thrilled with that conclusion, because she’s a master of stories that end up leaving unanswered questions.
She also talks about her grandfather from Nuremberg, who aroused her delight in dunghills, or about the mother as a miserable cook who fried turkey into jerky on Thanksgiving. She describes an aunt who furtively kept her purse on her lap while eating turkey and opened it several times. What this might have had to do with the withered meat is left to the imagination of the readers.
She pays a touching tribute to her mother: “With a cup of sugar, a pound of butter, a dozen eggs and a bag of flour, this woman became for sweets what Stradivarius was for the violin.”
Leon writes about slumber parties in Iran, where she once taught English. How friends passed the time with absurd games when they missed the curfew and had to stay somewhere else. How she tricked spies in China: To this day she can sneak down wooden stairs quieter than a mouse “and there isn’t a door that I can’t open without making a sound”.
Play in Saudi Arabia
In Saudi Arabia, she and friends invented a kind of Monopoly game to avoid boredom. Victory was everyone’s dream, for which you had to reach field 40: “Exit Saudi Arabian airspace”. But the way there was paved with as many obstacles “as the soul’s path to paradise”.
The description of dachshund Artù by friends in Venice is wonderful when tourist boats drove by on the Canal Grande, from which “O Sole Mio” rang out: “Completely beside himself, either because the music tormented him or because he mistakenly believed , his pack has gathered below and is asking for his dachshund solidarity, Artù howled terribly, while the tourists on the brimming boats took photos and waved at him enthusiastically.”
Leon is also musing about age after overhearing a woman refer to her as an “elderly person”. She was shocked at first. But: “At some point we will be confronted with the reality that we are suddenly living in the body of an old person.” Leon takes aging seriously. She is ambassador of a long-term study on aging at the University Hospital Zurich. Leon, an American with a Swiss passport, has lived in Graubünden for a long time.
In November 2021, she also spoke at an event there about the taboo subject of bowel movements. Your personal recipe for aging well, based on the study results: omega 3, vitamin D and physical activity. “I want to stay healthy as long as I live,” she told the dpa news agency. “If I can do something that simple with a good chance it will help, then I’ll do it.”
– A life in stories, Donna Leon, hardcover linen, 192 pages, 978-3-257-07209-9, 22 euros. (dpa)