Wandering through Life

Suzanne Toren gives an exemplary performance of this memoir by Donna Leon, author of the Commissario Brunetti mystery series. Leon, who is in her 80s, shares illuminating vignettes of her family; her love of reading, tennis, and opera; her travels and her life in Venice; and her peripatetic career path in a life she describes as "unplanned." Toren's rich, elegant voice helps listeners settle into Leon's reminiscences, which blend into a magnificent tapestry of her life. Toren perfectly paces the narrative, pausing to highlight moments of joy or difficulty, and bringing forth the humor sprinkled throughout. While Leon's fans will appreciate learning of her personal history, this audiobook will also be of interest to a general audience as a testament to an adventurous and spirited life. M.J. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Donna Leon is the author of 32 novels featuring Guido Brunetti, a Commissario di Polizia of the City of Venice. Trebitsch Produktion has adapted 26 of those books for German television. For 30 years Leon lived in Venice. She now lives in Switzerland. Leon was born in 1942 just south of New York, in the state of New Jersey. Her parents were Catholic with strong leanings towards the Democratic Party. Her paternal grandfather was born in Latin America and her mother’s father in Germany. Her family was eccentric, a fact she only realised when she started meeting other families. The stories she tells had me laughing out loud. Her father’s uncle married Florence who ‘bore a frightening resemblance to a horse’. Henry was their Japanese cook, an unseen presence, who was said to be in the kitchen, though ‘none of us ever laid eyes on him’. After university, Leon accepted teaching jobs in Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, eventually ending up at a United States army base situated an hour’s drive from Venice. Opera is a major leisure pursuit. Top of her list of best-loved composers is Handel. For many years, until his death in 2020, Leon was friendly with Peter Jonas, a fellow lover of Handel’s music, manager of the English National Orchestra and a talented raconteur. Wandering Through Life has short chapters, less than 200 pages and is ideal for fans of the ‘Brunetti’ series who’d like to know more about its author. Reviewed by Clive Hodges   ABOUT THE AUTHOR Donna Leon was named by The Times as one of the 50 Greatest Crime Writers. She is an award-winning crime novelist, celebrated for the bestselling Brunetti series. Donna has lived in Venice for thirty years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China, where she worked as a teacher. Donna’s books have been translated into 35 languages and have been published around the world. Her previous novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed; including Friends in High Places, which won the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, Fatal Remedies, Doctored Evidence, A Sea of Troubles and Beastly Things.

“Like most of the events in my life, the thought of assembling this book came to me accidentally,” Donna Leon notes in the preface to her memoir, Wandering Through Life. Leon, the author of the long-running Guido Brunetti detective series, has perfectly captured that serendipitous nature in the personal essays that make up Wandering Through Life. The memoir runs mostly chronologically, beginning with her childhood in New Jersey, where she lived on her grandfather’s farm. Leon is conversational and self-deprecating: “My brother and I get our almost total lack of ambition from [our mother]: she just wanted to have fun, to go through life seeing new things, learning about what interested her, going to new places. Because of this, I went through life never having a real job, never having a pension plan, never settling down in one place or at one job, but having an enormous amount of fun.” And “never settling down” is one of the memoir’s themes. The essay “Drugs, Sex, and Rock ’n’ Roll” tells the astonishing story of the years she taught English to helicopter pilot trainees in the Iranian Air Force. She arrived in Iran in 1976 knowing little of the country, and began to live an expat life (lots of tennis) with her American and British coworkers, even as the Iranian Revolution arrived. This is just one episode in a peripatetic life that includes stints in late-Maoist China and Saudi Arabia and decades in Europe, particularly Venice, Italy (where her Guido Brunetti novels are set). These essays feel like dispatches from a different era and world order, and they’re conversational, breezy and occasionally comic rather than contemplative. Leon’s tone is like that of an older friend who has a deep well of entertaining anecdotes from her storied life, and who has also developed an array of interests, among them opera, Handel and beekeeping. The layered essay “Bees” is a standout, describing her slow journey to gardening and her fascination with bees and their threatened existence. “They pulled me into the mystery of their being,” she writes of the bees. But Guido fans be warned: other than noting how her bee research worked its way into a novel, Wandering Through Life offers little detail about her writing life—Leon may be a prolific novelist, but in this memoir, she turns her focus elsewhere.