Donna Leon: Friends in High Places

Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series was such a treat that I looked up other crime

stories set in Italy. After two Camilleri novels of Inspector Montalbano

in Sicily (translated into English), I picked up Leon's `Friends in High

Places,` a Commissario Brunetti story in Venice.

 

The prose often felt repetitive and verbose. Just to give an idea, on page 97,

    Brunetti interrupted the doctor here. `Is there any way to tell which wound

    killed him?`

 

could be easily shortened to

    `Is there any way to tell which wound killed him?` Brunetti cut in.

 

or just

    `Is there any way to tell which wound killed him?`

 

as the context would've made it clear.

 

Multiple threads proceed at a painful pace and in the end, one murder is left

hung while the other two are only resolved in the brilliant detective's mind and

justice is clearly hopeless. ``No satisfaction. No revenge'' as Shylock would

say.

 

I loved the background details, the stories about the culture and history of the

place, woven into the fabric. It turned out that people living under the Italian

state machine shared strategies with many mainland Chinese.

    At no time did it occur to him, as it did not occur to Paola, to approach

    the matter legally, to find out the names of the proper offices and

    officials and the proper steps to follow. Nor did it occur to either of them

    that there might be a clearly defined bureaucratic procedure by which they

    could resolve this problem. If such things did exist or could be discovered,

    Venetians ignored them, knowing that the only way to deal with problems like

    this was by means of conoscienze: acquaintances, friendships, contacts and

    debts built up over a lifetime of dealing with a system generally agreed,

    even by those in its employ, perhaps especially by those in its employ, to

    be inefficient to the point of uselessness, prone to the abuses resultant

    from centuries of bribery, and encumbered by a Byzantine instinct for

    secrecy and lethargy.

 

And it was ingenious for the author to add usurers, the Volpatos, wearing a

``combination of greed and piety,'' which in hindsight should be obvious to

anyone acquainted with Shakespeare's ``The Merchant of Venice.'' How can anyone

talk about Venice without mentioning the moneylenders? Yet not even Dibdin said

anything in ``The Dead Lagoon.''

[7grizzly]

But 'knowledge' just doesn't cut it. It's something similar to the Chinese 关系``acquaintances, friendships, contacts and debts built up over a lifetime...''

[7grizzly]

回复 '暖冬cool夏' 的评论 : Thank you, my friend, for reading and your comment.

Both Dibdin and Leon lace Italian on their prose. It felt exotic sometimes and was rarely in the way. Yes. Google translates conoscienze to 'knowledge.'

[暖冬cool夏]

Brunetti interrupted the doctor here.--- the word "here" is not needed for sure, or the whole sentence. Agree with you. Your revision is more concise.

conoscienze: an Italian word for knowledge?