TITLE:
By its Cover
AUTHOR:
Donna Leon
Atlantic Monthly Press,
237 pages
Even at book 23 in her Commissario Brunetti series Donna Leon’s characters remain complex, her presentation of life in Venice continues to be alluring, and her plot is as gripping as ever. What sets By its Cover apart from the earlier novels in the series is its focus on books, or more accurately on what might lead someone to go to great efforts to steal or deface books.
Brunetti is one of those detectives who need to understand why a person commits a crime. It is not simply that he wants to learn the motive for a crime, but rather that he respects the complex of forces that can cause an individual to perform certain acts, even criminal ones, and this effort to understand directs his inquiries, conversations, and internet sleuthing. In By its Cover this effort takes him to rare-book libraries, book donors, and booksellers, and it prompts him to wonder about answers to seemingly simple questions (Why steal a book?) and more complicated ones (What is more important, the text alone of a fifteenth-century book or the book as a completed whole with cover and illustrations in place? Why?).
When Brunetti learns from the chief librarian at the Biblioteca Merula that books have been defaced and others have been stolen, suspicion turns to a scholar from the United States who had borrowed each of the affected books. Perhaps more importantly, this man is not who he says he is. But, others aren’t free from suspicion. What about the one-time priest who shared the reading room with the supposed scholar, or the somewhat nervous young men of the library staff, or is it possible that someone not connected to the library could gain access to its collection? The thefts and vandalism of six hundred-year-old books are important enough offences in Venice, but they become much more serious when someone connected to the library and the books is murdered.
As Brunetti pursues leads and hunches, he guides us through the streets and canals of Venice, across its plazas, and into its laneways and buildings. We stop with him before beautiful architecture and make our way alongside him through Venice’s villainous underbelly. We share firsthand his affection for his family, closest colleagues, and food, and we wrestle with him over some of the most demanding moral questions and longstanding traditions of Venetian life. It is Leon’s great achievements, on the one hand, that she keeps developing Brunetti and the characters that share this remarkable series with him and, on the other, that she balances this development to enable us to start the series with any volume.
