Over the weekend, the Times published a column by Cornell economist RH (“Luxury Bob”) Frank, “Will the Skillful Win? They Should Be So Lucky.” It begins with the clearest statement of the ideological rift that divides America’s elite into two camps (each of which brands the other as “the elite”).

There may be no topic that more reliably divides liberals and conservatives than the relationship between success and luck. Many conservatives celebrate market success as an almost inevitable consequence of talent and effort. Liberals, by contrast, like to remind us that even talented people who work hard sometimes fall on hard times through no fault of their own.

Frank goes on to cite a number of tests run at an experimental Web site called Music Lab. I wouldn’t put a lot of weight on these particular findings; assessing the role of luck on the popularity of rock songs — or of much more serious works of art — is problematic in the extreme, because creative works are too far from fungible. But if anybody is running tests showing that luck has nothing to do with success, I have yet to hear of it. It seems to be more and more generally accepted that successful people and projects have at some point accrued a boon that cannot be traced to talent and effort: Daniel Kahneman calls it “the halo effect.” How this halo comes to descend here but not there remains unexplained in terms of talent and effort.

It seems strange to me that, as Frank suggests, conservatives see a moral hazard in the liberal view of luck, imagining that it sanctions passive anticipation of good fortune. And that’s why I’m so grateful for David Brooks’s formulation of the issue last Friday, in his column, “The Credit Illusion.” Brooks pretends to be responding to an artfully crafted question from a successful businessman who signs himself “Confused in Columbus” and who complains about Mitt Romney’s remarks in Israel, crediting “cultural differences” with much of that country’s outsize success. “Confused” wants clarity: how much credit does he deserve for his success? Brooks’s answer is simple but magisterial.

Nonetheless, this question does have a practical and a moral answer. It is this: You should regard yourself as the sole author of all your future achievements and as the grateful beneficiary of all your past successes.

Will the mothers of America kindly start cross-stitching this motto on their infants’ pillowcases? Neither element of the rule is new; it’s the putting them together that’s arresting. You must prepare to work very hard, and you must we grateful when (and if) the hard work pays off. Truly, the most successful people ought to be the most humble. By which I mean that they ought to be the most generous, the most eager to help other hard workers. And the least inclined to stand smugly by while the poor suffer the burdens of poverty. If David Brooks himself actually came up with this solution — which it quite literally is; it dissolves the difference between the parties — then I call three cheers to the Times for paying him to sit around and think all day.

(I would like to amend Brooks’s rule slightly, to include a measure of gratitude not just for past successes but for the health and intelligence that hard work requires.)

***

The conundrum of fortune has a darker, more effectively political force, one that Felix Salmon wrote about a few weeks ago. Felix began an entry about the control of American education with a description of the Great and the Good who gather together at places like Aspen to discuss matters that, arguably, they know nothing about. 

For me, one of the more interesting tracks of the Aspen Ideas Festival is the series of conversations about education. Aspen is the natural habitat of America’s overconfident plutonomy: the kind of people who are convinced that since they have been successful themselves, they are therefore qualified — more qualified than education professionals, in fact — to diagnose problems and prescribe solutions. The ultimate example of this in recent weeks was the firing of Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia, by rich trustees who had no substantive beef with her at all. Instead, they just didn’t like her reluctance to sign on to various inchoate strategies, which sound great in a mass-market leadership book but which are unlikely to be particularly helpful in the context of a venerable educational institution.

These people have all read their Steve Brill, and have watched (or even funded) Waiting for Superman. They’re generally convinced that bad teachers are The Problem, and seem to think that that reforming the nation’s education system is a task somehow akin to akin to remaking General Electric. Measure everything, work out who’s good and who’s bad, and fire the underperformers: half of the problem is solved right there. Then, look at the great teachers, the inspirational ones, and the ed-tech innovators. If America’s remaining teachers just take a leaf out of their books, and start doing the things that work really well, that’s the other half of the problem addressed.

“Plutonomy” — what a great word. Plutonomists are unusually successful people who can’t give credit where credit is due, and who, in taking all the credit for themselves, proceed to act with decidely ungenerous vanity. There is nothing that they don’t understand, because their success both confers and guarantees a universal acumen. I need do no more than ask you to consider Donald Trump. But, for a more sophisticated example, remember Lawrence Summers on the capacity of women to do rigorous science, back in 2005. These men would be ridiculous if they were not also powerful and influential. It is impossible to attribute their persistence in foolishness to talent and effort, unless it is a talent for foolishness.

While everyone is complaining about bankers, I’m becoming fixated on developers, and I don’t mean just the real-estate types who build strip malls. I mean the visionaries who have the time and the resources to manipulate the ever more dense network of legal constraints that make getting anything done almost impossible for ordinary mortals. Robert Moses, a man who craved power but not wealth, was a tyrant of development that only age and the death of personal feudatories could stop. His legacy is official impotence and private licence. No exponent of the public sphere has been entrusted with more than a small fraction of the power that Moses accumulated, and improvements to the civil fabric have been abandoned to unaccountable warlords.

The awful truth about Celeste and Jesse Forever — not the simple one, which is that “Jesse” doesn’t belong in the title — is that it has a happy ending. A slightly uncertain one, but not the wretched “happy” ending that it might have had in the old days. Which means that it can’t be a screwball comedy, or a “comedy of remarriage.” In a screwball comedy, couples are obliged (often by their own vanity) to learn precisely why they belong together or, in the alternative, why they could never live apart. In Celeste, the title character (Rashida Jones, who also co-wrote the script) learns something else. She learns that today’s college students, no matter how smart, haven’t lived long enough to know how to make truly adult choices. Does this mean that they’re “immature”? You could say that, but you’d miss the point, which is that it takes longer than it used to grow up, and we wouldn’t have it any differently. Celeste learns that it was not a great idea to marry the man of her undergraduate dreams.

This is a lesson that Celeste thinks that she has learned by the opening scene. She has “broken up” with Jesse (Andy Samberg), and apparently the machinery of legal divorce has been set into motion. But they’re still best friends; they still go out to dinner together. She’s very comfortable having him live in the studio behind her house. He’s an artist — gifted, perhaps, but somewhat feckless, and certainly not driven, as Celeste is, to excel at his métier. Celeste’s métier is cool-hunting, trend-seeking. She and her partner, Scott (Elijah Wood), work out of a top-floor office in a shiny glass office building with angular attitude. The screenplay is too clever to comment on the world-historical insignificance of marketing, but it adroitly demonstrates Celeste’s expertise by showing it off in an informal setting. As a way of dismissing a would-be suitor, Paul (Chris Messina), Celeste fixes him with a briskly patient gaze and tells him why he has just replaced his car and his smartphone with models that better express his self-image. Paul looks stunned, but you’re not sure if this is because Celeste has actually nailed him; he just might think that she’s being astonishingly rude. But she has nailed him, as he acknowledges in a later scene. The happy ending of this movie is implicit in Paul’s coming back for more. Celeste may have his number, but his ego is intact. Paul is an adult.

Until Paul makes his advance, after a yoga class (and, yes, he goes to yoga class to meet girls; what could be more adult than that?), Celeste is happy with her broken BFF. She and Jesse really do make a cute couple. They have vast reserves of private jokes and polished routines; like a happily-married couple I know, they could go through an entire day talking in quotations. And they care about one another. Do they ever! Instead of blowing kisses, they raise their arms as if they were holding infants. It’s lovely, and touching, and it tells you that this is not a relationship between grown-ups.  

We get to know Celeste very well. Jesse remains a mystery, not necessarily an interesting one. The plot is set into motion by the protests of Beth (Ari Gryanor)and Tucker (Eric Christian Olsen), also best friends from college (the same college!), who are about to get married, and who are not best pleased by the way things have worked out between Jesse and Celeste. You’d think that they’d want the couple to stop talking divorce and keep singing the “made for each other” song, but, again, if Celeste and Jesse Forever tells a well-behaved narrative that observes the traditional pieties about comic timing, it does not do so by telling lies. It is a fantasy only in that it shows the truth so clearly. Beth and Tucker want Celeste and Jesse to move on. The upshot is that Jesse decides to start dating. His counsellor in these matters, a grass dealer called Skillz (Will McCormack, Ms Jones screenwriting partner), reminds him of Veronica, whom Jesse secretly spent the night with three months ago. She was nice, but for some reason Jesse’s shy about a second date. The next thing you know, Jesse runs into Veronica at a bookstore, and smiles and good wishes are exchanged. The rest of this romance develops offstage, and we are not allowed to form an opinion about Veronica. We learn that she got pregnant as a result of the first date, but the only conclusion that we’re permitted to draw from this news is that a person like Celeste — and this is a movie about Celeste — would never allow an unexpected pregnancy to serve as the foundation of a relationship. The fact that Jesse is open to possibility on this front is hard evidence of their profound incompatibility.

In any case, Jesse’s determination to marry Veronica so that she can stay in the country (she’s Belgian!) pushes Celeste into the discomfort zone of signing the divorce papers and facing life truly alone. She falls apart, visually; ordinarily beautiful even when she’s wearing glasses — on Celeste, eyeglasses are a beauty mark signifying the seductions of rampant intelligence — Celeste blurs in overindulgent collapse, eating, drinking, and smoking with abandon. She commits what at first looks like a catastrophic oversight in a major branding project. (But, no! It’s another demonstration of Celeste’s mojo, so cool that she wasn’t even conscious of it!) But she signs the papers, and then she gives Paul a call.

This is not a movie about how a smart woman learns to be grateful and to stop taking thing for granted. There is no comeuppance, no humiliation. Celeste has to realize that she made a mistake with Jesse, and she does; in their last scene, she and Jesse are, finally, not intimate, and Celeste is as willing as Jesse is to keep a distance. They’re sad about it, of course. But sadness is not desperation. There is no ghastly lunge at happy-ever-after. That would be fantasy of a lesser kind. This is a rueful parting, heralded by the last words of Celeste’s matron-of-honor speech at the wedding of Beth and Tucker: you don’t always have to be right, even when you are. With Jesse, it was understood by both of them that Celeste was always right, which effectively put their relationship into a stalemate. How could Jesse ever learn anything for himself? With Veronica, with the sudden prospect of fatherhood, Jesse may have jumped off a cliff, but for once he’s flying solo.

Celeste isn’t someone in need of a spanking. Paul says to her, “I like you. When you’re ready, give me a call.” She does. We don’t know what happens next because, for once, neither does Celeste. Maybe Celeste and Jesse Forever is a screwball after all: Celeste finds out how right she was. I think that that calls for a toast.  

***

 

Thought for the weekend: not since the palmy heyday of Katharine Hepburn has there burned on the screen such a fiercely beautiful intelligence as that of Rashida Jones. “You don’t have to be right all the time — even if you are.” Celeste and Jesse Forever is a remake of The Awful Truth for our times. I love Irene Dunne, never more than in The Awful Truth. But can you imagine what it would have been like with Katharine Hepburn? For one thing, it just might have ended as Celeste does.

And hats off to Chris Messina, for playing a man capable of credibly catching Celeste when she throws herself into the final jeté.    

***

I didn’t know that it was possible to break an Apple iPod dock — a dock made and sold by Apple. No moving parts, right? But, apparently, I did. The experience was another log on the fire: Apple is a fishy business. (Watch out, Twitter.)

***

I finished the Saturday chores on the early side, at about 3:30. I’d already shopped for dinner as well, so there was nothing that really needed doing. While Kathleen adjusted her sewing basket, I sat in my chair and eventually pulled up Hiroshige’s 100 Views of Edo, a book that I’d bought for a song at the Museum. I opened it up to Plate 37, I believe, a print that shows the view across the Sumida River to the west, with a distinctive mountain (not Fuji) in the distance. I read the accompanying text, which explaine details that I wouldn’t have registered as such, and checked out the map near the front of the book, which showed the vantage of this view and those of the next two pictures in the set. (I’m writing off the top of my head, because we’ve just had dinner and it’s Saturday night. Details are not important.) Then something bizarre happened. A feeling of the deepest, most meditative calm descended upon me, as though I were an Edo-ite savoring in his Proustian way the routines of a city that the “Meiji Restoration” would destroy as surely as the bombs that fell on other cities, and not only in Japan, in World War II. I have never known a book of pictures to convey anything like this feeling of profound calm, certainly did not open it in the expectation of any kind of “experience.” Which is what made the peace that fell upon me seem as miraculous as it was novel.

***

On Sunday afternoon, after a late but lovely lunch (Cobb Salad, put together entirely with ingredients that were not only on hand but read to be tossed — bacon, chicken breast, hard-cooked egg), I progressed to the computer and (and a bottle of Sancerre) ordered a lot of books. Books and book-like things, such as Derek Jacobi’s recording’s of the Sherlock Holmes stories. I had spent a good deal of time before lunch trying to find Elizabeth Bishop’s poems, without success. I’d been reading Colm Tóibín’s essay on Bishop in Love in a Dark Time, and it made me want to read some of the poems. I don’t know why the book isn’t with all the other poetry books, but I suspect, in fact, that it never was. It sat for a long time with a companion volume of essays and other prose works. Then the essays went to storage. Did the poems go as well? I can’t think so. In any case, I ordered the Library of America edition of her work, which includes a selection of letters.

I haven’t written many letters lately, at least from the traditional point of view. The lawyer in me has grown more restrictive: if something isn’t fit for mention at this site, then I probably ought not to be writing about it at all. My own point of view is that what I’m writing here is indistinguishable from what I would write in a letter.

***

After the movie on Friday afternoon, and saying goodbye to Ms NOLA at the corner of Houston St and Second Avenue, I walked uptown to Ninth Street, turned at Veselka, and dropped into Dinosaur Hill, the utterly irreproachable toyshop. I bought lots of things for Will. I bought a fire engine (he already has the accordion bus built by the same manufacturer to the same scale), and a Bruder backhoe, completely in plastic, that will be great on the beach; and I bought a Taj Mahal mold for sandcastling. I bought an inflatable political globe. I bought a very nifty little subway car with a few bells and whistles (lights, train noises, an announcement, opening doors on one side, traction). I bought a Putamayo sampler that I’m pretty sure I don’t already own. When everything had been tucked into a shopping bag, I asked for a piece of tissue to put over the top, because I intended to hold everything but the fire engine in reserve. Then I walked over to Will’s house, where I was scheduled to babysit.

The nifty subway car will go into Will’s bin of toys here at the apartment. The Putamayo disc will go virtual, playlist-wise. Everything else will be shipped out to Fire Island, along with seersucker shirts, the odd kitchen implement, and a selection of books. (I’m going to have a go at re-reading Trollope’s Orley Farm.) Two weeks from today, I’ll be writing from Ocean Beach, or such is the plan.

Even as I’m trying to deal with the prospect of being away from home for four weeks, Kathleen is trying to entice me to accompany her to London in October. The convention that she’s to attend will be held at a flashy center in Aldersgate, and she may stay at the same quaint hostelry that she liked last time she was there by herself. For my part, I’m not much of a City fan. It’s old and curious (when it’s not shockingly futuristic), but it’s not London. Westminster is London. Kensington is London. If I want old and curious, I can go down to Wall Street, which I will probably never do again in this life voluntarily. Done it! Every time I look at St Paul’s, moreover, I feel this completely bogus nostalgia for the Gothic cathedral that burned down in the Great Fire.

I almost bought a Staten Island Ferry toy for Will, but it turns out that I was very wise not to, because, as his mother informed me later, it’s a battery-operated plaything, and therefore unsuitable for the bath, into which Will would nevertheless wish to plunge it.

All excerpts today come from The Anonymous Venetian, by Donna Leon.

Once he had discovered them, women had conquered Brunetti, and he could never understand the sexual appeal of any — well, there was really only one — other sex.

***

Francesco Crespo lived only four blocks from Feltrinelli, but it might as well have been a world away. The building was sleek, a tall glass-fronted rectangle which must have seemed, when it was built ten years ago, right on the cutting edge of urban design. But Italy is a country where new ideas in design are never prized for much longer than it takes to put them into effect, by which time the ever-forward-looking have abandoned them and gone off in pursuit of gaudy new banners, like those damned souls in the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno, who circle round for all eternity, seeking a banner they can neither identify nor name.

***

Ten minutes later, he walked out from the sottoportico of the Calle della Bissa and into Campo San Bartolomeo. His eyes went up to the bronze statue of Goldoni, perhaps not his favourite playwright, but certainly the one who could make him laugh the hardest, especially when the plays were presented in their original Veneziano dialect, as they always were here, in the city that swarmed to his plays and loved him enough to put up this statue. Goldoni was in flull stride, which made this campo the perfect place for him to be, for here, everyone rushed, always on their way somewhere: across the Rialto Bridge to go to the vegetable market; from Rialto to either the San Marco or the Cannaregio district. If people lived anywhere near the heart of the city, its geography would pull them through San Bartolomeo at least once a day.

***

“He’s a cretin, hopeless,” Lotto said, voice heavy, as though he had daily reminder of that fact.
“Then what’s he doing working for you? You still do have the reputation of being the best newspaper in the country.” Brunetti’s phrasing of this was masterful; his personal scepticism was evident, but it didn’t flaunt itself.
“He’s married to the daughter of that man who owns that furniture store, the one who puts in the double page ad every week. We had no choice. He used to be on the sports page, but then one day he mentioned how surprised he was to learn that American football was different from soccer. So I got him.” Lotto paused and both men reflected for a moment. Brunetti found himself strangely comforted to know that he was not the only man to be burdened with the likes of Riverre and Alvise. Lotto apparently found no comfort and said only, “I’m trying to get him transferred to the political desk.”
“Perfect choice, Guido. Good luck,” Brunetti said, thanked him for the information, and hung up.

***

Before he started on them, he went back inside and picked up his copy of Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome. Brunetti picked up where he had left off, with the account of the myriad horrors of the reign of Tiberius, an emperor for whom Tacitus seemed to have an especial distaste. These Romans murdered, betrayed, and did violence to honour and to one another. Ho like us there were, Brunetti reflected. He read on, learning nothing to change that conclusion, until the mosquitoes began to attack him, driving him inside. On the sofa, until well after midnight, he read on, not at all troubled by the knowledge that this catalogue of crimes and villanies committed almost two thousand years ago served to remove his mind from those that were being committed around him. His sleep was deep and dreamless, and he awoke refreshed, as if he believed that Tacitus’ fierce, uncompromising morality would somehow help him through the day.

The one thing that I didn’t mention in yesterday’s entry — I mentioned it, but not as one of the draws that keep me buying the latest Donna Leons — was Venice. I have never been to Venice, but I should be very surprised if it does not seem familiar the moment I arrive, not because I’ve seen so many photographs of the famous buildings and curious canals, but because I’ve followed Guido Brunetto, resident of the Polo district, throughout the city, and in all weathers. I’ve followed him across the campi and about the markets and into little trattorie tucked into the corners. I may not have seen anything, actually, but I’ve absorbed some of the pace and quirkiness of life in Venice, which is essentially life as it is everywhere but with a few little wrinkles. Walk or boat, for example; how many instances, in the Brunetti novels, are there of the commissario’s working out whether a given destination is better reached by boat or on foot? A conventional realist, Donna Leon knows how to bring Brunetti’s Venice to life, and the danger for me, if and when I visit the actual city, I don’t unpack too much of the one that I’ve brought with me.

Reading Lauren Collins’s profile of Tino Sehgal in the current New Yorker, it struck me that the rejection of representation that characterizes modern art (even pop art, which substitutes hallucination for representation) is also a rejection of everyday life. The Sehgal installations that Collins describes are systematic violations of the conventions that govern everyday life. These violations are tolerable, presumably, because they occur in museum spaces, and most viewers, if they may no know what they’re getting into, know that they’re getting into something. But, again like so much modern art, they have a jokey air, an aspect of Let’s Pretend This Is How Things Are. There is no educational mission here; the object is not to discover something about how things actually are. The sociologists and cognitive scientists tackle that project. Contrasted with their disciplinary rigor, installation designers such as Tino Sehgal are pretty clearly fooling around.

I don’t object to fooling around, although I’ll admit that I haven’t much patience for it. What really bothers me is that anyone thinks of it as “art.” Art is something else. Art descends from Court Art.

***

Court Art, eh — minuets danced by nymphs and shepherds in pastoral nowheres? Very expensive objects, such as bronze clocks and tables made out of silver. Objets de vertu that you might spend a fortune on at A la Vieille Russie. That’s a part of it, but not the important part. 

Court Art is art intended to be enjoyed and appreciated by the most important people in the land, gathered together at least occasionally in a town, usually a capital, centered on some sort of palace. The palace is the building in which the most important people in the land come together, especially for ceremonial occasions honoring the ruler or the patron saints. The court is the secular ritual that takes place within the palace and that spills out of it into the town. It is here that women approach most closely the freedom of men. The court is grave for the most part, but tempered by sophisticated, well-mannered frivolity. Grave or frivolous, the court is always serious, because it is the center of power.

I’m describing the earliest courts, which arose in the Thirteenth Century in Italy. By the Eighteenth Century, Court Art was so well understood that it flourished in England quite apart from the royal coteries. One might argue that all of London, together with the satellites of the great country houses, comprised the English Court in 1800.

By 1900, there were no more courts anywhere. There were still kings and even a grand duke or two, but there were no more gatherings of all the important people of the land, and few ceremonies with any claim on attentiveness other than that of great age. There were too many important people for such gatherings, and there were too many ways of being important, many of them having little do with sovereign power. Like electric power, sovereign power was domesticated by 1900. It hummed along smoothly, doing whatever needed to be done with as little violence as possible. The personal rule of warlords was replaced by the elected authority of committees. 

Court Art, as it had been known to the most important people of the land, for whom it had constituted a kind of mirror, was no longer called for (and so the genre of large paintings depicting historical or mythological scenes came, along with others, to an end). But it did not disappear altogether. It persisted in two ways, ways that have today become antithetical.

The first is the persistence of craft. The techniques of Court Art are still studied assiduously, and traditional artists — that’s what they’re called — continue to turn out paintings and drawings and even sculptures that serve the people who enjoy them, quite aside from decorative value, as mirrors. Looking at a traditional painting that appeals to you, you see yourself in part. The vision is a serious pleasure, just as it was for people at court.

The second is the persistence of expositions of new works. For a long time, these expositions continued to feature the same kind of art that was produced for the court, but traditional artists were developing other interests, subjects that, in court eyes, appeared insignificant and unworthy of attention. These interests, curiously, could be traced back to the first sovereignty to dispense with a court: the Netherlands. It was there that mirroring art was first created for people who did not regard themselves as among the most important in the land. This tradition flowered beautifully at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

But how to continue the officially-sponsored expositions? It did not take long for Marcel Duchamp to show up with a urinal. Next week, I shall take up the mystery of how this “fountain,” and the installations to follow, continued to be considered “art” 

 

 

Reading The Anonymous Venetian, the third novel in Donna Leon’s series of Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries, was a great treat. We didn’t know about Donna Leon way back in 1994, when it appeared, but I think that we were about to find out, because we read the fifth novel, Acqua Alta, when it was new. One of Kathleen’s clients made the recommendation, and I recall that at that time the books were not easy to find in this country. If I’ve read the first book in the series, Death at La Fenice, I’ve largely forgotten it, which is good, because I’m thinking of reading all twenty books in order, perhaps this fall, perhaps next year.

Leon is not the first mystery writer to populate a multi-book series with an appealing supporting cast (although I wish I could think of someone besides P D James who has done it), but the recurring characters are the principal attraction for me. I look forward to spending time with Brunetti’s family — his vivid, brilliant wife, Paola, a professor of English literature at the university, and a worshiper at the flame of The Master; his son, Raffi, and his daughter, Chiara; and, very occasionally, Paola’s aristocratic parents. When at home, these people eat very well, but they also chatter and argue and sometimes even sulk. Then there is Signorina Elettra Zorzi, introduced in The Anonymous Venetian (I didn’t know that). What a woman of mystery! (Why has she taken a huge pay cut to work for the police?) And what a deadpan comic! (“The fact that his appointment is with his lawyer is one I do not feel myself at liberty to reveal.”) A few of the books have disappointed me not because the mysteries were so-so but because Signorina Elettra hardly appeared in them. Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta is not someone you would want to know, but you probably do know someone just like him, and can marvel at Brunetti’s mastery at manipulating his boss’s outsized but tender vanity. It is a truly Sisyphean task, because even when Brunetti gets what he wants, the Vice-Questore is still in command, still the sort of hollow man who seems to monopolize positions of command in our bureaucratic world.

Another figure introduced in The Anonymous Venetian is Officer Scarpa. This seems to be a first appearance, anyway, because Brunetti’s encounter with him is “stony” but not inimical, as encounters are in later books, when Scarpa becomes a kind of Satan in uniform, dedicated to thwarting Brunetti’s investigations (or so it seems to Brunetti). “Scarpa” is close to “Scarpia,” a connection that the author must certainly have wanted her readers to make. If the name “Scarpia” means nothing to you, then no harm done; you won’t be perplexed. But if you know it, and can’t help hearing the monster’s blasphemous outburst during the Te Deum, “Tosca, you make me forget God!” in act one of Puccini’s opera, then a resonance surrounds Scarpa — his lesser capacity signified by letter missing from his name.

That is the sort of thing that makes the Brunetti books so engaging: they’re opened up at every turn by tacit references to a world of culture and thought, to serious questions about faith and meaning. When Brunetti flies from the room of his demented mother (whom he nevertheless visits faithfully), he is reassured by the nun that the old lady is always happy to see him. “And once she senses that it’s you, Dottore, she’s really quite happy.”

This was a lie. Brunetti knew it, and Suor’ Immacolata knew it. Her faith told her it was a sin to lie, and yet she told this lie to Brunetti and his brother each and every week. Later, on her knees, she prayed to be forgiven for a sin she could not help committing and knew she would commit again. In the winter, after she prayed and before she slept, she would open the window of her room and remove from her bed the single blanket she was allowed. But, each week, she told the same lie.

(I would have suggested that Camus change his title, to The Grace of Sisyphus.)     

***