Book Review

By Derryll White

Leon, Donna (2007).  Suffer the Little Children.

Donna Leon is always insightful and sensitive to her adopted city of Venice, Italy.  Her character, Commissario Guido Brunetti, and his wife Paola and family, always give the reader a sense of being in the city and inhabiting the place as one reads  along. She mixes the old and new Italian politics seamlessly into story development, creating an understanding of what the ordinary Venetian is confronted with daily.

Her sense of place in her writing is as well-developed as anyone currently publishing.

The author deals in this novel with infertility, peer pressure and the corrupting power of money and influence.  These are subjects not unique to Venice or Italy but Leon uses her keen sense of surroundings and atmosphere to make the reader open to the business and political corruption that Brunetti experiences, and to bring that home to Canada.  Having just gone through a provincial election in B.C., Leon’s description of the Lega Doge party seems particularly apt.

Donna Leon points a finger at the medical records on-line in Italy, and the mischief that can be created by hackers whose beliefs are more ‘moral’ than the common person. She is very adept at having the reader ask, “but what about me and my personal secrets?”

A wonderful storyteller, the author is very effective at stimulating the reader to peer below the surface of things, to ask why our world is as it seems to be. Perhaps why the morality of some is judged better than the actions of others.  Donna Leon always leaves a long series of questions in the reader’s mind.

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Excerpts from the novel:

POLICE POWER – And the Carabinieri – Brunetti had encountered too may of them who loved bursting in and imposing their sudden, terrifying authority, as if Mussolini were still in power and no one to say them nay.

EASTERN EUROPEAN TOURISTS – Brunetti had always felt a regard for these tourists because they looked at things.  Perhaps too poor to buy most of what they saw, they still gazed about them with respect and awe and unbridled delight.  With their cheap clothes and their bad haircuts and their packed lunches, who knew what it cost them to come here?  Many, he knew, slept for nights on buses in order to spend a single day walking and looking and not shopping.  They were so unlike the jaded Americans, who had of course seen bigger and better, or the world-weary Western Europeans, who also believed they had but were too sophisticated to say so.

ITALIAN POLITICS – Paola had not had to tell him where the office of Marcolini’s party was: its location was etched into the minds and hearts of every Venetian either by fame or by shame.  Lego Doge was one of the separatist political parties that had sprung up in the north in recent years, their platform the usual primitive cocktail of fear, rancour, and resentment at the reality of social change in Italy.  They disliked foreigners, the Left, and women with equal ferocity, though their contempt in no way lessened their need for all three: the first to work in their factories; the second to blame for the ills of the country; and the third to prove their masculinity by serving in their beds.

FEMININE PERCEPTIONS – Tits and ass.  Paola had again observed, months ago, that he should spend a day counting the times he saw tits and ass: in the newspapers, in magazines, in ads on the vaporetti, on display in every kind of shop window.  It might help him understand, she suggested, the attitude of some women towards men.

MORALITY – “Nasty little bastard.”

    “Most moralists are,” said Brunetti wearily.

    “Is there anything you can do about it, or about him?” she asked.

    “I don’t think so,” Brunetti said.  “One of the strange things about all of this is that no matter how sordid or disgusting any of it is, the only thing Franchi’s done that’s illegal is look at those files, and he’d be sure to argue – and believe – that he was simply acting in the best interests of his clients.”

INTERVENTION – “And that’s what did happen: he left.  So there will be no children who might disrupt God’s plan of perfection by developing manic depression like their mother.”

    Politeness kept Franchi from answering that this was a very good thing.  God’s creatures should emulate His many perfections, not pass on an illness that distorted the divine plan….. He turned to Pedrolli.  “I told you some time ago, Dottore, that I don’t understand what you’re talking about.  What I do understand is that Signorina Salvi suffers from a disease that could be transmitted to any children she might have, so it is perhaps better that this engagement has been broken off.”

    “With your help, Dottore?” Pedrolli asked.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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