Donna Leon Interview

viewers from around the world have come to love the German produced films featuring the happily married utterly normal commissar EO Greedo brunetti said in Venice the police work may look familiar but brunetti goes about solving crimes in a distinctly unhurried and gracious manner the movies are based on a series of best-selling english-language crime novels by the American author Donna Leone she's originally from New Jersey but for many years she's called Venice home I went first as a tourist in the late 60s I was in my twenties in my late twenties and I was lucky enough to make the friendship of a young woman Roberta and then two years later I met her fiance who became her husband I went back to Venice at least once a year between 68 and 81 and Franco and Roberta over the course of those years became my best friends my family friends my intimate friends and so in 80 when I made the mistake of going to Saudi Arabia to earn a lot of money and have the only time in my life when I wasn't happy after that experience I called them and I said it's finished basta basta I'm not going to do these jobs anymore I'm not going to be an academic mercenary anymore it's time to settle down I was I was close to 40 and it was time to settle down and so I moved to Venice because after years of roaming around the world that was the one place where I had always been the happiest and where by that point because I'd been introduced to their families and had become the cousin the sister the this that of lots of Venetians and northern European and northern Italians I decided that was where I most wanted to live but my decision to go there was not an aesthetic oh I must live in the in Lacetti misty mother I went because that's where the people I loved lived luckily it was the most beautiful place in the world and I remained because I found a job so it was a place where I could live very peacefully and very happily and of work judging from her books blockbuster sales Commissario Brunetti has become a beloved character to millions of readers all over the world because he's a decent guy because he's decent he's intelligent he's savvy he's low-keyed and beyond all of the misery of his work and the disgusting things he has to do in his job I believe he's a happy man he's a he's a man who is content with life as he lives it in his own his own world unlike the characters in much modern fiction he's not a misfit he's not a loser he's not an alcoholic he's not a cultural zero he's a man who reads he knows about music he knows about philosophy he can quote Cicero he can quote Livy he whisper he responds to human intelligence brunetti may respond to intelligence but the books also portray him as a man who's very aware of the beauty in the natural world around him part of that comes from living in Venice you don't drive there you walk there and when a person walks even even those of you who live in this in any city when you walk you notice the flowers if you're driving you don't and because in Denis we we get rained on we get snowed on we slip when there's ice on the ground because it because the buildings are tall in the streets are narrow if it snows the snow is there four three four five days so one is one is always exposed to the weather our geography exposes us mercilessly to the weather and because people don't have air-conditioning if it's hot it's hot Donna Leone's first Brunetti mystery was death at la fenêtre published in 1992 the is set in the world of opera and began as a lark for the author I was in the dressing room at Laughlin EJ with Gabriela Farrow who's a visa sicilian conductor usually a bel canto he and his wife and I were there because he was conducting La Favorita the French version of Tony jetties La Favorita with Shirley Verret and during an interval in a rehearsal we were in the dressing room and somehow we started speaking about another conductor whom neither of them liked personally or professionally and there followed an escalation which has now become an Italian word une escalation and we found ourselves with him dead in the dressing room and the idea came to me that it would be a very good idea for a murder mystery to find all with his with his his toxin is his starched shirt his little bow tie the idea of writing a book had never occurred to me until I got the idea then and I thought yeah let me see let me see if I can do that and so knowing nothing except from what I had learned by inference from having read so many of these while I was in graduate school because because I didn't have a television and I think in many ways reading were murder mysteries is akin in terms of intellectual energy to watching television or as television was twenty-five years ago I wrote the book in about eight months and then it's sat in a drawer for a year until a friend nagged me into sending it off to a competition in Japan which it won and then I was given a two book contract by an American publisher which required that I write a second book which had not been my thought when I wrote the first book it's it's all and I think that's why I I seem but am cavalier about this because it was nothing I ever agonized over it was nothing I ever really wanted it was just something that happened I'm delighted that it did but I I can have a certain a certain kind of emotional distance from it it's great fun but it's not the be-all and the end-all in the purpose of my life living in Venice for more than 30 years has given Donna Leone a great opportunity to study the nation's up close there are reserved people there northerners there northern Italians and there is a kind of I find a kind of privacy about them once you get beyond that they are warm and loving and friendly and very affable and very funny they are a mercantile people and so their attitude towards the acquisition of wealth is quite unburdened by embarrassment that they are merchants and that that really is in their blood the idea of profit is is very deep-rooted in their hearts as it is not in the hearts of southerners I find that southerners are far more and I'm speaking in gross generalities I find that southerners are far more open hearted and open handed than Venetians are one of the great pleasures of the brunetti books are the descriptions of Venetian life including amazing meals to an Italian food is not special food is simply another part of a pleasurable life you dress well you live in a beautiful place you look at beautiful things and you eat beautiful things at least once a day this Italians are not food snobs because to them it is not something extraordinary to be boasted about it's just simply part of a well lived life the novels depict crime in all levels of the nation society from within the world of the moneyed and privileged to marginalize populations but how much of the books plots does she know when she starts writing usually I have an idea to begin with some very often it's a scene that I that I imagined a good example would be that one in one of the really early books where a a truck goes off a snow-covered Road and catapults down a hill and smashes open and what look like mannequins crash out of the back of the truck but then the mannequins begin to bleed on the white snow I had a an image of that who they were what they were doing in the truck who knew I had no idea but I liked I like the idea because it's a it's what I think a crime writer has to do in the first chapter you have to just grab them by the throat and pull them kicking and screaming into the second chapter blood from a stone came out in 2005 and focused on profiteering from illegal diamonds mined in African war zones I was going into campus on toast ethanol at Christmas ten years ago and there was a kind of Christmas Fair with with open booths and beyond it there were two rows of Voe comprar these guys from Senegal with their sheets down and their bags all made by the Mafia on the on the ground I looked at them and the light bulb went on in my head and I said why would someone kill one of them why could that happen and that the place was given because I was at the the open fair in Santo Stefano I think on Christmas Eve or soo soon before Christmas and that's all I had I knew that I was going to kill one of those guys but I didn't I had no idea why and then I started reading about Senegal and about Africa and then I started reading about blood diamonds and at the time which is 15 or 20 years ago if you took if you took a map of Africa and you put on it a star for every place where there was a civil war and then you superimposed upon it a map of where there were diamonds it fit that many many of these wars then and probably now are not for freedom justice independence they're for diamonds blood diamonds through a glass darkly was published in 2006 and was about environmental crime committed by an old-fashioned glass maker I know some people who work in Murano and I know those about OVA who's a I think she's a fifth generation more amazing who now teaches the history of glass at the University her father was a glass maker her grandfather a great-grandfather and Rosa took me to a number of glass factories and I spent a long time watching them make glass not the kind of places where tourists get taken on the on the private boats from San Marco but a place where people work and I was I was enchanted with it because I kept thinking take away the tennis shoes and the gap t-shirts and these guys are doing and fire it with wood rather than gas and these guys are doing the same thing that their great great great great great great great great great and they probably were their ancestors did 500 years ago or six or seven and I found that miraculous the 1996 novel acqua alta took readers into the world of art forgery 20 years ago I saw a show called fake and bought the catalogue it was a show of falsified counterfeit art pieces ceramic metal paintings and I was fascinated this is even before Brunetti was what was a possibility and I read through the catalogue and then when I got the idea of writing a book about art theft and art fabrication falsification I went and reread the the catalog and then I did a lot of research I did a lot of research on the falsification of ceramics in both the novels and the films the man by Brunetti side is sergeant vanilla a kind of Venetian everyman who invariably has insights that help brunetti solve the cases but yet he needed a sidekick he need a an assistant in whom he could trust and VNL Oh is is pretty much a Venetian type he's married to a housewife he has a couple of kids he's just a regular guy he probably goes home and watch a soccer on television but he's most often got this gut of wisdom but I think that's true I think that people who are are stable and who have been paying attention to life when they get to a certain age and they've had the experience of a happy marriage and decent kids they they know things they understand things brunet ease other main assistant is senior inna Electra who ends up being as helpful as via nello in her own way I got to a point where brunetti was absolutely stymied and someone knocked on his door so I turned off the computer I went out for a long walk I came back I opened the door I opened the computer and then I opened the door and then walks in your Dean Elettra and she's been with me for 15 years doing all those things that I don't know how to do look up things and find things and enter into people's accounts she's very useful we asked Donna Leone if her venetian friends were skittish about talking to her since whatever they said could end up in one of her books no no no because usually we I think all people who write this kind of book must develop some sort of ethical system about what you can and what you cannot use so mine I think I could describe as being one where I would never use a story that is traceable back to someone that is traceable back to the source but then it's like any city is rich in urban gossip because everybody knows everything or if that person doesn't know what you want to know they can find out what you want to know about that person if you're if you're on this this gossip web and I'm on the gossip web because I've been there so long and I know so many people but I would I would never ever write something about someone that I knew even disguising them because that's you don't do that besides being about crime Donna Leone's ebooks are also very much about the Brunetti family mom dad grandmother two teenagers who all genuinely like each other for donnelly own writing about a happy family isn't much of a stretch I feel almost as though I have to apologize for being genetically disposed towards happiness I come of happy people my my parents were pretty happy people particularly my mother and so my default mechanism really is to be cheerful I wake up at 6 o'clock in the middle of this this terrible world we inhabit and I'm cheerful all I need is coffee and then I'm even more cheerful because I'm I'm sort of jet propelled into cheerfulness and I think that comes of coming of happy people and so his relationship as the progenitor of a happy family comes from my observation as a member of a happy family that's what I observed that's that's the I'm like Conrad Lawrence's little baby what were they geese or ducks or whatever they were so I don't know the The Naturalist who who was adopted by the when they were hatchlings saw him first so he became the mother Keese I'm like a Conrad Lawrence goose that's that's the example I saw so that's what I follow and consider consider the alternative lucky me to have had that one and rather than the the obverse with no sign of stopping Donna Leone continues to write a novel a year does she still enjoy writing them oh yeah it's so fun it's great fun because if it weren't fun I wouldn't do it because if it weren't fun for me it could never be fun for anybody else you

Channel: MHz Choice

Views: 34,821

Rating: 4.8153844 out of 5

Keywords: Mystery, Drama, Foreign TV, Subtitles, International Drama, MHz Choice

Id: MOvMeylJi78

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 01 2014