Book Review

By Derryll White

Leon, Donna (1999).  Fatal Remedies.

There are a couple of constants a reader can expect from Donna Leon.  There will be vivid, rapturous depictions of Venice, Italy, more alluring than any travel guides.  As well, there will be growth and change with Commissario Guido Brunetti and increasing depth in the relationship Guido has with his wife Paola and his two children.

Leon comments at length here on the exploitive sex traffic between Europe and developing countries.  Paola takes extreme exception to the phrase “paedophiles love children” and Leon springboards from there into a feminist examination of sex and power.  Somehow, through the chaos and uncertainty of law vs. justice, the author creates a touching examination of just what love is.

There are continual references in ‘Fatal Remedies’ to the work place and the politics of same.  Every reader will relate to instances of abuse, meanness and poison experienced in the day-to-day operation of Brunetti’s ‘Questura,’ and the revelations of just how nasty some co-workers are.  Leon brings real life to the novel page.

The author always manages to reach out into a wider world.  Here the reader gets a clear sense of the Italian attitude toward taxes – don’t pay them!  She goes further, exploring the nature of evil and man’s insufferable greed, recognized here in the way a large company can exploit Third World need and misery.

Always with Commissario Guido Brunetti there is the question he proposes of how can a human act like this, exploit and murder others for one’s own profit.

********

Excerpts from the novel:

THE SEXES – “It means that men and women look at this differently.  Always will.”

“Why?”  His voice was level, though both of them knew that anger had slipped into the room and between them.

“Because, no matter how much you try to imagine what this means, it’s always got to be an exercise in imagination.  It can’t happen to you, Guido.  You’re big and strong and, from the time you were a little boy, you’ve been accustomed to violence of some sort: soccer, rough-housing with other boys; in your case police training as well.”

She saw his attention drifting away.   He’d heard this before and never believed it.

MORALS – He had no doubts whatsoever about the illegality of what Paola had done. He stopped walking and considered that she had never denied it was illegal.  She simply didn’t care.  He spent his days and his life in defence of the concept of the law, and she could spit on it as though it were some stupid convention that was in no way binding on her, just because she didn’t agree.

SEX – She stopped for a moment, then added, “I’m not sure if this has anything to do with what we’re talking about, but I think another cause of the guilt that separates us on this – not just you and me, Guido, but all men from all women – is the fear that the idea that sex might sometimes be an unpleasant experience is real to all women and unthinkable to most men.”

MEMORY – Brunetti turned back to the door and let himself out.  The toasters continued in their endless migration to the right, technological lemmings bent on their own destruction.

POLITICS – Brunetti was struck, as he had been frequently and strongly in recent years, by the absence of talk about politics.  He wasn’t sure if no one cared any more or if the subject had simply become too inflammable to permit strangers to attempt it.  Regardless of the cause, it had joined religion in some sort of conversational gulag where no one any longer dared, or cared, to go.

TAXES – “No.  I manage our factory in Castelfranco Veneto.  Interfar.  It’s mine but it’s registered under my sister’s name.”  He saw that Brunetti was not satisfied with this and added, “For tax reasons.”

Brunetti nodded in what he thought was a very priest like way.  He sometimes believed that a person in Italy could be excused any horror, any enormity, simply by saying that it was done for tax reasons.  Wipe out your family, shoot your dog, burn down the neighbour’s house: so long as you said you did it for tax reasons, no judge, no jury, would convict.

MURDER – Brunetti had no idea how many times he’d said that there was little in human evil that could surprise him, yet each time he stumbled or pounced upon it, it did.  He’d seen men killed for a few thousand lire and for a few million dollars, but it never made any sense to him, regardless of the amount, for it still put a price on human life and said that the acquisition of wealth was a greater good – a first principal he could not grasp.  Nor, he realized, could he every fully comprehend how they could do it.

– 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.

Article Share