Mortal Remains: What does the Venetian lagoon hide?
Donna leon, successor of Agatha Christie in the title of the great queen of crime and world top sales of the black genre with her twenty-six novels on the market, has made the decision to use the last one, Mortal Remains, as a platform from which to report the situation on the planet.
I recognize that every time a new Donna León book comes out, I rush to the bookstore to buy it. This generates in me an unconscious propensity to enjoy it and, at the same time, high expectations that Leon must achieve in each new adventure of Brunetti, my favorite curator.
Deadly Remains: Gender Negro?
When I read the synopsis and reviews of Mortal Remains talking about the change of third of the lady of crime in his latest novel, I was disturbed. How could we have gone from the crimes told with magic, from the invitation to live Venice as if we were born there, from the classic and tenacious investigation of a crime to find the culprit to talk about climate change and ecological demands? For the first time, I bought a book by my favorite author reluctantly, afraid of disappointment.
I started reading it and the first few pages did not alleviate my misgivings: After twenty-five excellent installments by Commissioner Brunetti solving crimes and crimes in the purest classical style, based on his intuition and field work, in number twenty-six, Brunetti takes a stress vacation. He goes alone, without Paola, without the children, to a house in San Erasmo, an island in the middle of the Venetian lagoon. In the second chapter, without seeing any crime to solve, I had already hooked. Nothing had happened, Brunetti arrives at the house and there is Casetti, the guardian, depressed by the recent death of his wife, with his daughter Francesca and his son-in-law. Casetti, an expert rower, invites you to accompany him on his strenuous and relaxing rowing excursions through the lagoon, where they visit the beehives that are spread over different islands in the lagoon, many of them uninhabited. Bees in some hives are dying for no apparent reason. With this argument alone, with a handful of dead bees taking the place of several murders to be solved, the magic of this writer had already completely entangled me.
I advanced letting myself be carried away and, although making myself beg, the answer to my expectations arrived: In Mortal Remains, not only do bees die, andIt's a crime novel, with corpses and investigation. As well It fulfills what the synopsis promises and what those who reviewed the book anticipated before it came into my hands: It is a cry warning of the destruction of the planet, a voice defending ecology that is reaching millions of readers. It is not a Brunetti novel to use, it surprises just enough to be recognizable and, of course, it does not disappoint.
New case for Brunetti: What kills the bees in Venice?
Unraveling the Mystery:
It is striking because, in the first half of the novel, very few things happen, there are no concrete facts beyond reflection and feelings, but the feeling of restlessness in the reader is growing: There is a tension that is not explained, it is not shown, but it is perceived between the lines, even greater than in fast-paced cases in which the first chapters are full of action. It reads fast and fluid despite the first chapters not giving us any convulsive event. You feel the exhaustion of Brunetti after hours of paddling in the closed water of the great lagoon, the heat of the sun through the shirt a nervousness similar to that experienced by the viewer when, in a classic horror movie, the music announces that something horrible is about to happen.
At the end of the book, I had the same feeling as always Donna León, that "I want more Brunetti" which leads him to deliver us a new case every year, but this time also left me with a strange unease about the future of humanity And that is precisely what is exceptional about this story: today I feel a quiet need to do something and a latent concern in the shadow of my thought that, before beginning Mortal Remains, I did not have or, at least, did not know.
Bravo for Donna León, for daring to change without ceasing to be herself, for deciding to try and for getting it right doing it.