A Question of Belief audiobook
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Review #1
A Question of Belief audiobook free
Review #2
A Question of Belief audiobook in series Commissario Brunetti Mysteries
So much crookedness and chicanery in Venice one wonders how commisario Brunetti succeds or even survives. What I enjoy most is Dona Leon’s descriptions of Venice and the Venetians. Taxiing by boat. The ancient palazzos and churches. How ones birth and wealth still open all doors. The fact that Brunetti’s wife is a professor of English Literature and the daughter of a count. And their children are living in the present. In a very ancient place.
“seamlessly blending straightforward descriptions of events, pointed moral lessons, and tightly-focused dramatic accounts, his historiography contains deep, and often pessimistic, insights into the workings of the human mind and the nature of power.” Wikipedia on the historical writings of Publius Cornelius Tacitus.
Guido Brunetti — whose austere view of Italian life, both public and private, underpins this remarkable series — is reading Tacitus rather than Russian history. His books on Russian history are in the mountains with his vacationing family, while Brunetti swelters around Venice, returning home with a pizza to eat on his terrace “while drinking two beers and reading Tacitus, the bleakness of whose vision of politics was the only thing he could tolerate in this current state.” (201)
As the Wikipedia quote suggests (oh come on, tell me you don’t short-cut with it) Tacitus manages clarity of narrative and psychological insight while delivering a moral lesson.
So, too, does Donna Leon.
As other reviewers note, most of the loving and entertaining scenes of Brunetti/Falier family life are missing from this book. There are no luscious meals detailed from shopping through prep work, from serving to savoring, from second-helpings to dishwashing. Figs and prosciutto are all we get, and briefly. And yet it is faith in that family-life which constitutes the center holding Brunetti’s cosmos intact. Early in the book we hear a shockingly frank rant from Paola about the power of belief over reason. Sparked by the sight of Brunetti’s proposed reading on the Russian Revolution, Paola denounces her youthful political ideals in the most brutal yet of her recent self-fashionings:
“To think that I voted Communist. Of my own free will, I voted for them. . . . You know me well enough to know I’m not much for shame or guilt, but I will forever feel guilty that I voted for those people, that I refused to listen to common sense to believe what I didn’t want to believe.”
Brunetti tries to comfort: “They never had any real power here.”
Paola refuses to shelter in that argument: “I’m not talking about them, Guido; I’m talking about me. That I could have been so stupid and have been so stupid for so long.”
There is the heart of this narrative, the failure of reason in the face of the desire to believe. The two plots both arise from this moral and intellectual battle, but the third element of the novel – Brunetti’s reading – is more obscure than in other of Leon’s books.
Looking at the title, I assumed he would be reading Plato. Turning the early pages, seeing Leon set up a series of ethical dilemmas involving the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave, I looked in vain for mention of The Republic.
But Leon is more subtle than that. The sad deceptions we find here – card-readers duping wealthy women, greedy contractors subverting the judicial system, Patta’s relentless fetishizing of appearance over reality – aren’t worthy of the grandeur of Plato’s vision. So Brunetti reads a Roman who critiques Plato and we get devastation at one remove.
Donna Leon’s novels offer us many things: glimpses into the lives of the people who actually live in Venice, a complex view of the modern family, the politics of life in a bureaucracy, the architecture of loving friendships. Here she raises the stakes by asking about the nature of reality. How do we know if our desire to know truth leads us to the light of faith — intellect — or to the shadow on the cave wall that is belief?
This isn’t a beach read, but it would make an excellent airplane book, allowing the reader to follow all of the nuanced plot lines without interruption. I teach a murder mystery class every other Spring semester and this term I taught About Face. While the kids liked the setting and the politics and the family life, they didn’t much like the reading that all the characters do. “Too much thinking,” they complained. They would like this book even less, at least while they are undergrads. But they will return to the series later in life, at once more jaded and more hopeful, and find it entirely wonderful.
Review #3
Audiobook A Question of Belief by Donna Leonm
I love this series and Donna Leon’s writing so I’m probably prejudiced, but this is a book that grabs the reader from the start and doesn’t let go until the end. The stifling heat of Venice in August brings the city and all its workers to their knees. Even the crooks and panhandlers take a break. The tourists keep piling into the city to enjoy the waterways which are still and putrid in the heat. An old woman is being fleeced by a TV fortune teller, a judge and an usher are suspected of postponing cases for months and years to one party’s advantage. When the usher is found murdered in his courtyard Commissario Giudo Brunetti becomes involved, and he’s forced to give up his vacation in the mountains. He is not a happy man. This story hammers home the bureaucratic greed and corruption that impedes all justice in Venice and everywhere.
Review #4
Audio A Question of Belief narrated by David Colacci
There is a fashion in police procedural novels to start with a violent prologue whose relevance only becomes apparent much later in the book. In contrast, Donna Leon’s approach is almost old-fashioned, and none the worse for that. A Question of Belief begins mundanely with a puzzled Ispettore Vianello trying to come to terms with on-line card-reading and fortune telling. More serious, but more familiar themes take over – court cases unreasonably delayed, contracts of dubious legality. Commissario Brunetti is looking forward to escaping midsummer heat in Venice and perennial venality in government by taking his family to the hills on holiday. He is halfway there when – but that would be halfway to revealing the plot, so let’s leave it at that.
Brunetti remains the most human and humane of policemen. When his conscience comes in conflict with the strict letter of the law, there is no guaranteed winner. And sometimes, as in this most successful of the author’s plots, the loose ends feel very much like life.
Review #5
Free audio A Question of Belief – in the audio player below
I have read two more books of these serie, earlier ones, and I like them quite a bit. This one seemed to me a bit too slow but picks up and gets interesting towards the end. Also as an Italian several of her comments on what she seem to depict as typical Italian ways really appear for what they are that is prejudices and this has annoyed me quite a bit. Overall a nice reading, i’lll probably go back to read one of the initial books.
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