In Love with France, At Home In Italy

I am not being fickle when I say I am in love with both these gentlemen. IT MAKES ME FEEL BETTER JUST TO KNOW THAT THERE ARE PEOPLE LIKE THEM IN THIS WORLD. Of course they're not really in this world at all, but since I've lived in Italy, they have become part of the interior world of my head. It's true that as an adolescent I went through a crime novel phase, mostly delving for the sex scenes ("And when she took off her clothes, I realized she was a REAL blonde..."). Yes, at age 14, I thought Mike Hammer in "I, the Jury," was a very sexy dude. But once I was a so-called adult, I never went near mystery lit. Until now, that is. I am currently pondering the mystery of how I fell under the spell of Donna Leon's Brunetti, whose "beat" is Venice. At first I resisted, since my heart already belonged to Commissario Montalbano, from exotic-to-me Sicily. But this summer I have worked my way through 22 Brunetti novels, and am already in mourning...

The “Hallelujah Chorus” is gloriously blaring, the mist over our valley is dissipating, and the hunters have temporarily stopped shooting (after all, it IS lunchtime in Italy). I’m thinking about letters: the one I posted here but never sent to Andre Aciman, the one Kafka never sent to the father who terrorized him, and the one Commissario Montalbano just wrote to himself in the novel I’m reading. Unlike the way it happened with Andre Aciman, with whom it was love at first sentence, it took me a while to get hooked on the Sicilian detective Montalbano. Although I went through an adolescent phase of devouring Mickey Spillane and his ilk, that is no longer my thing. Like the Italian husband who doesn’t “get” what his wife sees in the TV version of what he calls the “really short, bald, bow-legged Montalbano” who so often seems to be having an exasperated temper tantrum over the stupidity that surrounds him, I’m surprised at myself. I’m rethinking quite a number o...