My Venice and Other Essays

Many of us thoroughly enjoy Donna Leon's mysteries set in Venice and featuring Commissario Guida Brunetti. I've always thought Brunetti was an interesting detective because he's convincing as an Italian man (Leon is an American woman, a New Jersey girl), as a happily-married family man, and as a cop in a milieu very different from Harry Bosch's or Matthew Scudder's. Leon has lived in Venice for thirty years and My Venice and Other Essays is just what the title says it is.

Most of these non-fiction pieces are short, no more than three or four pages. Because they are not dated nor does the book contain any indication where they may have been published previously, they read almost like Leon's private musings about incidents or occasions to vent some spleen or make a point.

The sixteen Venice essays take about fifty pages of the 222-page book. Leon groups the others into five headings: "On Music," "On Mankind and Animals," "On Men," "On America," and "On Books." All the pieces are clear and lively. One might disagree with Leon's opinion, but it's evident what she thinks when, for example, she calls Tosca "a vulgar potboiler I wouldn't today cross the street to hear." (She's a rabid Handel opera fan.)

She can be very funny. One of the Venice essays, "S***," describes a nuisance with Venetians and their dogs. A woman permitted her tiny white Matlese to empty his bowels directly in front of a man's front door as he happened to be standing in the window drinking his coffee. The dog finished his business, the man came out his door, the woman approached. "Excuse me, Signora, is this your dog?"

Leon writes: "She threw up her hands in offended innocence and said, 'no, of course not.' The man smiled, called to the dog in a gentle voice, and when it came, he picked it up and delicately turned it upside down, then used the fur of its back to brush up the s***. Just as carefully, he set the dog back on its fee, said a polite 'Buon giorno' to the woman and walked away."

As someone who has just written a mystery, I was particularly interested in Leon's penultimate essay, "Suggestions on Writing the Crime Novel," one of the longest in the book. It is worth the price of the book. She begins by pointing out that "the defining element between the good and the great is some inborn genius that is either present or not. Without it, painters or tennis players can be good; with it, they will be great. I see no reason why this should be any different in the world of words, though I realize how uncomfortable the idea makes most people."

Having thereby cleared the ground somewhat, she discusses several practical aspects in writing a novel: point of view; the knowledge, information, and reference of the narrator; the level of the prose; the narrator's ethical standards; the central crime; the novel's scope; and "the reader's feelings toward you as a writer, and toward your characters. The reader has got to feel sympathy for someone in the book." Without feeling sympathy for the victim or the detective or the criminal or someone, why waste a precious few hours reading the book?

Fortunately, while not all the pieces are equally engaging (but then how could they be?), My Venice and Other Essays is a way to spend a few precious hours with a fascinating and stimulating woman.

This is a varied collection of essays by Montclair native, Italian expat, about life in her adopted city and her thoughts on men, music, books, and social injustice. Not all of them work. Her essay about the clock in the San Marco Tower is lovely, but the ending is abrupt and frustrating – what happened to Alberto Peratoner? The essays with humor are generally charming, but where she attempts to be funny, she falls flat. On social issues, some of her arguments are specious. She does not try to impress with an abundance of Italian expressions, but untranslated the exact meanings are not always clear. My principal complaint is that each essay should have been dated. For instance, where she talks about not wishing to get into discussions about religion or the pope, it would be instructive to know which pontiff was then in the Holy See. I have never enjoyed any of her mystery novels, but I did enjoy this book.

Snobby, curmudgeonly and dated (all those references to lire!). She likes opera. That's about it. Everything else, she complains about or if she likes it, it infuriates her that so many other people come to her city to share in it. There was a seriously strange chapter comparing tourists to terrorists. Uck. I've enjoyed her fiction and I was very surprised how negative an impression this book made on me. And the odd thing is, she's not even a native. Where does she get off being so possessive?

I’ve enjoyed every one of Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti mysteries, so I was looking forward to getting a deeper understanding of Venice in particular and Leon’s philosophy of life in general from her essays. But this book was disappointing. Most of the pieces in this collection are not well-developed essays, but short musings or observations – some even seem more like diary entries. Many are mere snippets that would serve better as local color in one of her novels than as stand-alone accounts. Most disturbing, however, was that Ms Leon did not take to heart her own advice to aspiring mystery writers that “it is essential that the reader like the narrator.” With a few exceptions, this collection of ‘essays’ is really a catalogue of complaints that leave the reader wondering why the author loves Venice so much, or whether indeed she likes anything.

This collection of essays gives the reader a great insight into Donna Leon's life in Italy and especially Venice. The essays are a collection of published magazine articles she wrote for a variety of different magazines, and the themes range from culture, politics, family-life, and history of Venice. The reader gets an intimate idea of what life in Italy is like, written in a witty and intelligent, and always very entertaining style. I could picture how theses anecdotes of Donna Leon's life became the basis and foundation of her Brunetti mysteries.
It is obvious how much she loves Italy and Venice, but she can still look on hit not with the eyes of a tourist, or outsider, but with the eyes of someone who has experiences every day life and its struggles.
The collection of essays can easily be read one after the other, or you can put down the book and pick it up whenever you have some time to read a short essay in between other things.
I found myself jumping chapters and picking out what suited my mood.
This book is perfect to read while waiting for the next Brunetti installment and still getting your Venice and Donna Leon fix.
Copy provided through NetGalley

What a delightful, sometimes dark group of essays! Witty, sometimes hilarious, often self deprecating, always with an brilliant edge. Nothing is off the table. The conversation cuts a wide swathe through life in all it's complexities.
Donna Leon brings Venice alive. Through the eyes of both an inhabitant and an expat we taste the puzzling differences and laugh at the idiosyncrasies, and the similarities.
I really identified with her piece about buying her villa! Sweeping in, being mesmerized by the view, but blind to the detrimental structure of the building. Ah, Bellissimo! Swept up by the view and the ambience, forgetting about the plumbing, the flooding roof and and collapsing walls. For Leon, 'it was love at first sight, and not for the first time, was to prove [her] ruin.'
Each essay is a little gem and tells us something about Italians and Venice that as tourists we would never discover for ourselves. I must admit there are some moments when I felt positively guilty about being a tourist in Venice.
But Venice is only the beginning. Leon pulls no punches when she talks about male female relationships in Italy. Her dismay about attitudes is palpable.
We journey to the United States and New Jersey with equal vigour. Certainly the streets and the people spring to life in all places. Life viewed through Donna Leon's eyes is certainly a grand experience.
Grazie tanto! Ms. Leon.

A NetGalley ARC

It can be either an interesting or a tedious experience to read a book from an established novelist in which he/she resorts to non-fiction to expound upon themes touching upon life, men and women, poverty, family, home, books, and music.

In "My Venice and Other Essays", the celebrated mystery novelist Donna Leon speaks with an unflinching honesty on subjects as varied as her beloved Venice (which she has made her home for the past 30 years), animals, men, music, her native land (the U.S.A., which she looks upon with a decidedly critical eye, which is not unlike any expatriate who has become fully acclimated to his/her adapted land, yet still retains a curiosity in the home country), and books.

There was one story Leon relates in one of the essays that made me chuckle. It concerned a woman in a fur coat who took her dog out one day for a walk. At some point, the dog took a dump in front of a man's house, while he was at the window of said house, taking his coffee. The woman, for her part, set some set between herself and her dog so as to give the impression to passerby that she had no connection to the dog. Well, the woman lets some time pass and walks back in the direction of her dog when the door to the man's house opens.

"He looked down, saw what was directly in front of his door, looked at the dog, looked at the woman, and asked, 'Excuse me, Signora, is this your dog?'

"She threw up her hands in offended innocence and said, 'No, of course not.'

"The man smiled, called to the dog in a gentle voice, and, when it came, he picked it up and delicately turned it upside down, then used the fur of its back to brush up the s--t. Just as carefully, he set the dog back on its feet, said a polite 'Buon giorno' to the woman, and walked away.

"We five erupted in joy, as though Venice had just won the World Cup. Two pounded the table in their happiness, one cried out 'Vittoria,' and then we lifted our glasses in a toast to the genius of our Venetian Terminator."

Short essays that often read as op/ed pieces, the collection offers interesting insights into Leon's life and interests. I found it intriguing that despite four decades living in Italy, she is so very American and, sometimes, not in a good way.

Please skip this bitter ugly and mean diatribe. Her fiction is outstanding, her essay-horrid. She hates almost everything and everyone. Her view on Americans though is psychotic. Bless her poor little heart...but she doesn't like Venetians either. Whilst a talented fiction author, the real person is nuts.