Backstage
Stories of a Writing Life
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4.2 • 5개의 평가
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- US$12.99
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A memorable collection of stories and essays on writing, reading, teaching, and Venice by the celebrated author of the bestselling Guido Brunetti series
Donna Leon’s memoir, Wandering through Life, gave her legions of fans a colorful tour through her life, from childhood in New Jersey to adventures in China and Iran, to her love of Venice and opera. Nowhere, however, did she discuss her writing life.
In Backstage, Donna reveals her admiration for, and inspiration from, the great crime novelists Ruth Rendell and Ross Macdonald, examining their approach to storytelling as she dissects her favorite books of theirs. She expresses her love for Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and her appreciation for Sir Walter Scott’s generosity of spirit. And she chronicles the amount of research she undertakes to be able to present authentically, through Guido Brunetti and his colleagues, places and characters far from her own experience—from interviewing a diamond dealer in Venice to open up the world of blood diamonds, to meeting, through back channels, a courageous sex worker and women’s rights activist to depict accurately the trafficking of women in Italy. By contrast, the idea and opening scene of one of her novels came to her as she was walking through Venice.
Venice is central in her memory, whether recounting the semi-comic irritation of a noisy elderly neighbor or the origins of the city’s Carnevale. Her teaching career yields memorable tales: helping a young Black boy in a Newark, New Jersey, elementary school; instructing young Iranian pilots in English just before the 1979 Iranian Revolution; and taking her students at a Swiss private high school to the famous Frank Zappa concert in Montreux interrupted by fire.
Throughout, she is as good a storyteller about herself as she is a chronicler of Guido Brunetti’s crime adventures. Readers will be as caught up in her world as she is in his.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crime novelist Leon (the Guido Brunetti series) serves up a wide-ranging collection of poignant and amusing essays about her writing process and artistic influences. Some entries are wonderfully breezy: in "With a View of San Marco," Leon spars with a noisy neighbor in Venice; in "Jack and Jill," she imagines various literary analyses of the eponymous nursery rhyme ("The Marxists would no doubt point to the inevitability of historical processes that lead to the auto-destruction of crowned heads"). Elsewhere, Leon reflects on authors and episodes that have shaped her own writing. She recounts a formative trip to Iran, waxes poetic about the virtues of Ruth Rendell's murder mysteries ("Rendell understands most things better than most other writers; the one thing she understands best is evil"), and paints pointillist portraits of an eccentric diamond dealer, whose insights informed a handful of Leon's novels. The essays are succinct and narrowly focused, with little in the way of formal advice for aspiring writers, but Leon's humor and narrative economy offer their own rewards. Even readers unfamiliar with Leon's fiction will be delighted by these dispatches.
