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Author: Donna Leon
ISBN : B008DYIFDY
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Format: PDF
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Donna Leon has won heaps of critical praise and legions of fans for her best-selling mystery series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. With The Jewels of Paradise, Leon takes readers beyond the world of the Venetian Questura in her first standalone novel.
Caterina Pellegrini is a native Venetian, and like so many of them, she’s had to leave home to pursue her career. With a doctorate in baroque opera from Vienna, she lands in Manchester, England. Manchester, however, is no Venice. When Caterina gets word of a position back home, she jumps at the opportunity.
The job is an unusual one. After nearly three centuries, two locked trunks, believed to contain the papers of a baroque composer have been discovered. Deeply-connected in religious and political circles, the composer died childless; now two Venetians, descendants of his cousins, each claim inheritance. Caterina’s job is to examine any enclosed papers to discover the “testamentary disposition” of the composer. But when her research takes her in unexpected directions she begins to wonder just what secrets these trunks may hold. From a masterful writer, The Jewels of Paradise is a superb novel, a gripping tale of intrigue, music, history and greed.
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Epub The Jewels of Paradise [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 1036 KB
- Print Length: 292 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0434022284
- Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press (October 2, 2012)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B008DYIFDY
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,715 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Epub The Jewels of Paradise
I love Donna Leon's books. I've loved them for 20+ years. And I was delighted that there was going to be a new character, a woman. Paola Falier is a character of/from whom I never see/hear enough -- mordant wit personified.
Caterina is no Paola Falier. She is the oddest combination of experience and cluelessness. She swans around various digital databases, but evidently can't imagine setting up the Italian equivalent of a gmail account. She loves Venice but conveys this with the catch-phrase "ridiculous beauty," substituting oxymoron for visual detail. What a cheat. And her voyeuristic interest in the family across from her window -- although it fits with her obsession about children -- verges on the deeply disturbing.
But _geeze_. This isn't a book; it's an outline. Certainly Leon knows the first rule of storytelling -- show, don't simply tell -- but she ignores it here. The composers >>> music get some detail, but not the living people. Venice -- even Venice! -- gets short-changed. We are told how ugly Manchester is, but there's not one single specific, not even about the rain. Ditto the food. The faculty dinner party at the beginning promised to be hysterical, but the author flipped us off with a few adjectives and an epithet or two.
The plot is an excuse for the music, and that would be OK if there were actually a plot; instead it's a collection of improbable circumstances. Things happen for 200 pages and then a thin, thin plot-let shimmers across the few remaining pages then things stop. I have two questions: if one famously rich and powerful branch of the Roman Church had the trunks for centuries and an even more powerful branch is backing this undertaking, why on earth do they need the farce of hiring a musicologist with 5 languages?
As someone who loves (and knows more than a bit about) Baroque opera and who had thoroughly enjoyed all of Donna Leon's wonderful Inspector Brunetti books set in Venice, I was primed to read this new Leon tome. No, I wasn't expecting a Brunetti character equivalent in the world of musicology. But I was expecting the character enchantment and engagement that I had from the first pages of the very first Brunetti book.
Fifty pages in and I was asking myself how it was possible that this book was written by the same Leon who wrote the Brunetti books. The sentence structure, the style, the use of Italian phrasing (that required me to stop and look up the meaning as Leon provided none nor a context), the heavy-handedness with the research aspects of the storyline...the lack of interesting characters, particularly the main one, Caterina. I simply could not believe that this was written by the same writer who created and grew Brunetti. The same author who brought both ancient and contemporary Venice to life and explored a whole range of topics within the Brunetti series. And who made us feel as if we personally knew both Brunetti's work and real families. Vivid, interesting and never boring characters. (If you've read the Brunetti books, you know how well Leon handles the whole exploration of literature in them whether it's a discussion with Paola, Brunetti's literature professor wife, or Brunetti's own musings on various books. This is a marked contrast to how the music history bits are handled in this book. Night and day of difference and not in a good way.)
The theme of Baroque opera--including its history--could have been explored with a lot more intrigue especially in the hands of someone like Leon.