But you also want other people to understand those things. You’re really very much like Henry James. And because he makes us understand those things. I want to know why people do things.” Paola amplifies that in the beginning of About Face, when asked why she finds Henry James so fascinating: “Because he understands things. “I’m nosy by nature,” he says in Willful Behavior (2002), “and I always want to know how the story will end or how or why it got started. She asks him her own questions, prodding him to explain things, though first he often has to explain them to himself.īrunetti is a seeker. He keeps her informed about the progress of an investigation, gives his impressions of people he questioned and the answers they gave. Such comments notwithstanding, Guido and Paola work as a team. “’Only one,’ Paola said.” ( About Face, 2009) ‘I was kidnapped as a baby and forced to live with lunatics.’ “Chiara moved her plate aside, laid her head on the table, and covered it with her hands. “And know that he will never be contradicted,” Brunetti forges on, “and that every word will be considered a gem of knowledge, his every utterance respected for its wisdom.” “It is a comfort and a joy to a man,” proclaims Brunetti, sitting down to the lunch table in the midst of a Raffi/Chiara spat, “to return, after a hard day’s work to the peaceful bosom of his loving family.” Chiara taps her watch and reminds him that it has been only half a day.
#GREEK SOUNDING PHEW CROSSWORD FREE#
It also gives them all free rein to indulge in the sarcasm at which each of them is adept: The four of them enjoy both lunch and dinner at home together every day-food is a constant, mouth-watering presence in all of the books-and at them the conversations are lively and the topics wide-ranging, from work, life, and school to books (Guido prefers the ancient Greeks and Romans, Paola re-reads her favorite Henry James novels six or seven times) to any number of political and social issues. Brunetti can hardly blame her for any of it, however, given the horrendous industrial pollution of the air, sea, and land all around Venice. They are now the parents of two teenagers, Chiara and Raffi, who age only slightly during the course of the books, and whom they love passionately, even through Raffi’s “Karl Marx period” and Chiara’s rabid environmentalism, which has led to household bans on air-conditioning and bottled mineral water, and her own semi-strict vegetarianism. Brunetti’s poverty as a child has influenced his thoughts and action ever since-he only got to go to college because his only brother, Sergio, stepped in to help, and it is there that he met Paola, crashing into her in an aisle of the library. They come from very different backgrounds, “her father, a count, her mother the descendant of Florentine princes Brunetti’s mother a woman who had left school at twelve, his father a hopeless dreamer ruined by years as a prisoner of war” ( Unto Us a Son is Given, 2019) in Stalin’s gulags after World War II. Together, however, they make one of the most wonderful and enviable marriages in all of detective fiction. She is “a woman of leftist, if chaotic, politics” ( Uniform Justice, 2003) sometimes leading to attacks of zeal, and trouble, and he is subject to fits of despair about his job, his city, and his country-and in the thirty books, and counting, that Donna Leon has written about Brunetti since 1992, there has been plenty to despair about. They disagree, of course, about matters big and small-they squabble, emote, banter, dissect, proclaim, and sigh. Guido and Paola Brunetti know a great deal about lies and half-truths, and all the other human failings, he as a commissario (detective superintendent) in the Venice police, she as a professor of English literature beset by lazy students and self-important colleagues-but still, after more than twenty years of marriage, they make each other laugh. Then she put her head back and laughed until the tears came. Paola looked across at him open-mouthed in surprise. “So fiction really is fiction,” Brunetti asked.
#GREEK SOUNDING PHEW CROSSWORD FULL#
“Life doesn’t have a narrator-it’s full of lies and half-truths-so we never know anything for sure, not really.
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