In Love with France, At Home In Italy

Dear Donna Leon, I can't believe it took me this long to find you. Nearly 68 years, to be somewhat precise. And now, having just finished the last of your available Brunetti novels, I have very mixed emotions. I never expected to be spending the first few months of leave from my academic appointment--my first significant period away from teaching--falling for Brunetti. I haven't read much in this genre since I was a teenager on the prowl for steamy scenes in Mickey Spillane. I was supposed to be spending this time off my Ivy League treadmill working on my own writing, instead of my usual work of helping others to write. But I could not stop myself.  You know how in Alice in Wonderland, the King said gravely that one is supposed to begin at the beginning "and go on till you come to the end: then stop"? Well, I started at the beginning of your oeuvre, and here I am. Here's how it happened. My 85-year-old writing partner who knew of my fascination with Montalbano o...

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...