4.5★s
“The process of memory is odd, isn’t it? Do we remember things because we were there and saw them, or because we’ve been told them so often that they’ve been forced to become real?”

Wandering Through Life is a very aptly titled memoir by the award-winning American author of the Commissario Brunetti series, Donna Leon. It is presented in the format of thirty essays on a variety of topics. As she writes in her eightieth year, she has quite a life on which to look back.

Leon notes that even at eighty, orchestra and writing keep her occupied. She mentions Irish and Italian immigrant grandfathers, remembers living on her grandfather’s farm for a year at the age of seven.

She offers a variation on Tolstoy’s observation about families: “What families are each in their own way is weird.” She goes on to mention quirky aunts and uncles: a rumoured lover of Isadora Duncan; a card cheat; a plumber. She remembers her mother Mildred, known to all as Moo, a trusted keeper of secrets whose happiness she passed on to her children, and recalls her mother’s restless energy that contributed to an annual Halloween costume for the family dog, trick or treating.

Leon describes first learning to read, and discovering what became a lifelong fascination with, and love of language: “while still a child I had examples of the miraculous deceitfulness of written words that confuse with their sound and spoken words that seem to have the right to mean whatever they please. Because I am a native English speaker, this untrustworthiness is a source of delight, not frustration. Further, it seems to me that English, and the English, are much given to this sort of verbal nonsense.”

She shares amusing anecdotes about selling tomatoes to fund college, and her mother’s disastrous Christmas turkey. She confesses her love of Tosca, of Handel; and she has a moan about music pollution.

She describes the career path that ultimately brought her to Italy: four years of teaching English to trainee helicopter pilots in Iran in the late seventies, living under martial law, friendly and generous neighbours, and curfew pyjama parties and. Eventually, evacuation.

From there, teaching in China with daughters of loyal Party members as translators. Where she discovers her students’ Anglophone-writer-acquired prejudice against blacks and Jews, and their embarrassment over love sonnets.

Then to teaching in Saudi Arabia, where boredom leads to the creation, with her colleagues, of a board game, $audiopoly. In a country of no alcohol and no pork and where every Saudi student had to be passed regardless of academic ability, their customised game cards were a little subversive.

From teaching English to US Army recruits in Venice, Leon jumps to her first taste of Italy, a year with a college friend in which she fell in love with the people and the country.

In Venice she describes the search for the perfect cappuccino, an encounter with a lover of Wagner, being drawn to Handel’s Messiah through thick fog, a well-dressed, well-shod not-plumber, and the old Venetian matrons whose shopping technique takes a leaf out of a Prussian war writer’s book.

She tells of the ambitious build of a gondola by an American, and the detrimental effects on the city of the continuous engine vibration of exhaust-emitting cruise ships. She comments on post office efficiency, and her own criminal imagination of those she observes around her, and she shares a letter to Brunetti tourists that she was asked to write by the Questura.

Leon describes the joy of train trips and the food sharing that entails, her attachment to a feral cat, how her new garden led to a fascination with bees which meant inclusion into a novel; she fangirls Handel; and, finally, she muses on ageing. An interesting, occasionally thought-provoking, and entertaining read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Grove Atlantic.

Donna Leon has been with me for many years in her stories of Commissario Guido Brunetti and his family and colleagues in his Venetian crime novels. I had the great pleasure to meet her in person in the 1990s. Her memoir is light and filled with people in her family and experiences rendered in brief "memories" like blog posts. As a contemporary of Ms. Leon I can relate to her experiences in kindergarten and her/my Irish upbringing in the 1950s. I too learned the alphabet and brought a metal lunch box to school and ate vegetables from cans and frozen bricks for my mother’s meals at home. I especially enjoyed the chapters about her first experiences in Italy with food and the welcoming warmth of families and open hospitality. There is much humor in the vignettes especially at the Rialto market in Venice with old women forging their way to the front of the line. In the last chapter there is hope for old people (like us)...we are not as young as before but not too old to live our life joyfully as we age.

I have enjoyed reading the Guido Brunetti, by Donna Leon for years and although I knew she lived in Italy (mostly due to her wonderful sense of place in the books) I just assumed it was a case of leaving the US in her early writing career and moving straight to Italy. So I was amazed to learn how her life was filled with adventures, twists and turns leading her to Italy. This was an interesting and entertaining book.

A fascinating look at the life of one of my favorite authors. Really enjoyed getting to know more about her. If you have read her books you must read this one.