Wandering through Life: A Memoir
By Donna Leon
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 193 pages, $26)

When a writer charms, instructs, amuses, or simply mightily entertains us, it’s natural enough to wish to know more about the creator behind the creation. What is this writer — whose work so beguiles me — really like? If I knew this writer, would I enjoy having dinner with him/her? (Speaking mostly of fiction writers. We hold non-fiction writers at more of a distance — like Sgt. Friday said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”) Enter the writer’s memoir.

Memoirs differ from autobiographies in granting the writer the indulgence to treat a host of subjects, not just an A-to-Z chronology. When well-wrought, these can repay the reading time by yielding the desired insight into the favored writer. The danger with them, though, is that some can be mere exercises in lily-gilding or forums for score-settling — writers being, with admirable exceptions, a scratchy lot. These need not detain us. And I won’t name names.

But then there is Donna Leon, creator of the popular series of novels (32 and counting) featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Police. Her Wandering through Life is certainly one of the more eccentric memoirs that readers will encounter. It’s brief at 193 pages. It’s also well named, as Leon has wandered a good deal, from job to job and country to country, in what she describes as a thoroughly unplanned life. “I am feckless and unthinking by nature, and have never planned more than the first step in anything I have done,” Leon says. This will doubtless come as a surprise to those who’ve read her novels and appreciate the discipline and sustained effort required to produce them. They’re not the product of a butterfly mind. Perhaps Leon is having us on a bit here.

I found Wandering both a delight and a disappointment. I suspect other fans of Guido, the subtle, polite, and smarter-than-he-lets-on cop and family man, will find it so as well. And there are plenty of these. Count me in. The novels have sold millions of copies and been translated into 35 languages. (But not, by Leon’s request, into Italian.) (READ MORE: Meloni Pushes to Outlaw Italian Participation in Global Surrogacy Industry)

The delight comes from Leon’s amusing but unrelated vignettes — so unrelated as to be almost non sequiturs. She shows a deft touch in describing her life teaching English in Iran (pre-ayatollah), China, Saudi Arabia, and Venice; the beauty she’s found and the love she feels for Italy and Italians; her love of music (thumbs up for Handel, thumbs down for Wagner); how elderly Italian women can cut lines at stores and get away with it using tactics that could have been learned from von Clausewitz; the difficulty of getting a plumber or mailing a letter at the PO in Italy; and her preference for the train over air travel, as “[p]eople on planes are usually grumpy and in a hurry; people on trains are patient and eager to chat.”

Readers who go Wandering with Leon will also learn about gondolas. After three decades of living in Venice, Leon knows about gondolas. Those who choose to visit Venice may be helped by Leon’s advice on how to find the perfect cappuccino. You’ll get her gripes about hordes of summer tourists and cruise ships, which benefit Venice economically but are also physically damaging to the fragile city. There’s a longish piece about bees, complicated creatures that figure into Earthly Remains, Leon’s 2017 Brunetti novel.

The disappointment for me, and doubtless for others who choose to read the book, is that Leon shares little of her creative life. When did she decide to write? She was a literary late bloomer — her first novel was published when she was 50. Why detective stories? And why Guido? Her claim to our attention is that she’s the creator of the charming and resourceful Guido. But we learn little about how these stories came about, how and why she created Brunetti and the other recurring characters in her series the way they are. Perhaps she’ll reveal more in a later book.

Leon might even reveal why she declines to have her entertaining stories of Guido & Associates translated into Italian. She’s a bit cryptic about this. Researching this, all I could find was her quoted as saying: “I don’t want trouble … I’m really a coward. I will do anything to avoid confrontation.” Who she thinks would confront her about Guido, she doesn’t say. Some of her novels feature incompetence and corruption in the Italian government, including the police, but that the Italian government can be a bureaucratic sinkhole with lots of players in it for themselves is hardly a well-kept secret.

While she still visits Venice regularly, the pollution and crowds there led her to take up residence in Switzerland a couple of years back, a move that must have caused a good deal of cultural whiplash. After almost 30 years of the chaotic feast that is Italy, she concedes that the orderly Swiss and their regular ways took some getting used to. “I’ve been spending so much time in Switzerland in recent years that I feel living here has corrupted me,” she says. “If trains are late I grumble; if the plumber comes fifteen minutes late I am shocked. Corrupted, you see.” (READ MORE from Larry Thornberry: Sowell Pins the Tail on the SJW Donkeys in Social Justice Fallacies)

Those familiar with my byline know that one of my guilty pleasures is detective fiction, which, at its highest level, and with apologies to Anthony Trollope, can tell us more about how we live now than any number of literary prize winners. There’s plenty of dreck in your bookstore’s mystery section, and much that’s entertaining enough but otherwise literarily empty of calories —  forgotten as soon as they’re finished. But the best writers of crime fiction use conflict, setting, and theme and challenge their characters with moral choices in a way that sets their stories well above genre fare. Donna Leon belongs to this select sorority/fraternity. That’s why I enjoyed this wander with her, despite the fact that I still don’t know how Guido was born or why Italians can’t read Guido’s stories in his and their language. After all — and Donna Leon would agree with this — what’s life without a little mystery?