Donna Leon's 'Wandering Through Life'

Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti series, set in Venice, is a great annual pleasure, and I’ve read them since the first, Death at La Fenice (1992). Now, at the age of 80, she has given us Wandering Through Life, called ‘A Memoir’, but not quite that: more a series of 30 vignettes in roughly chronological order. Like the detective stories, they are written with effortless ease.

They are simultaneously revelatory and elusive, covering a wide range of subjects - teaching in China and Saudi Arabia, cats, bees, Tosca, friendship, the search for the perfect cappuccino. But both her personal and her professional lives are withheld, perhaps most surprisingly in terms of Brunetti, whose appearances are few. Nevertheless, it is reassuring to be in the hands of a person for whom culture in its broadest sense is central, and to be enjoyed, and deeper than any of the superficialities of the digital era. This is seen to greatest effect in her essay on her profound love of Handel:

He turned out tunes, melodies, music that flowed in a seemingly - thank God - endless stream from his pen. His goal was to delight, and in his music one hears what a happy, happy man he was.

Well, that’s pretty personal.