By Anne W. Semmes
So, there I was in the emergency room of Greenwich Hospital, lying with my sore knee on my hospital bed in the passageway as all the rooms were filled. Spending some five hours there to be examined, how grateful I was I had brought with me a book, a mystery, by a favorite author Donna Leon. She kept me in Venice as the stretchers of ailing folk passed by. And then it was blood-taking time by that bright-eyed female medical professional. And as she drew my blood she glanced across at my book and exclaimed, “You are one of a kind – the only one here reading a book!”
Well, perhaps there were some reading books on their iPhones or listening to a book on Audible. But Donna Leon, now writing her 34th mystery at age 81 (some 46 entries in the Greenwich Library), surely would be happy that I had a hardcover book of hers in my hand.
This and more I learned from a recent extensive interview that popped up of her in a Financial Times newspaper shared by friends. “Her love of print newspapers and distrust and dislike of the invasiveness of technology,” writes the interviewer, is mirrored in her main character, Venetian police Commissioner Brunetti. Leon, who is an American from New Jersey (now dual citizen with Switzerland) has taught literature across the world, and her character Brunetti is a policeman “who reads Proust.”
Leon features in her mystery plots what she is concerned about in the world. The “rise of political extremism” …” the “escalation of senseless acts of violence by teenage ‘baby gangs’ in Italy.” She wonders, “If it is partially caused by the fact that people don’t read anymore. Nowadays people get all of their information from their telephones, but they don’t know who the person is behind it.” Leon has no mobile phone, does not use social media, and has no television in her home outside Zurich, Switzerland. She had to flee Venice with it being choked by tourism.
“She strongly believes that discussing fiction is just as important as reading it,” writes the interviewer. For years she and a writer friend “ran a group devoted to rediscovering classic novels with 40 elderly Swiss people,” and would “assign an Edith Wharton novel, a Henry James novel, or Conrad, and then just talk about it…They would get into heated discussions on why this worked, or why that didn’t work…it was heaven.”
So, this reporter once joined a book club in Greenwich led by Esther Bushell who has sadly retired. I remember vividly arriving at her house and seeing piled by the front door the publisher manuscripts left by the postman. And it was a treat hearing her guest authors addressing their books. Esther is now in a retirement home that has a book club, and she knows of many book clubs ongoing across Greenwich.
And what a wonder to discover the number of book clubs listed at Greenwich Library, Cos Cob Library and Byram Shubert Library, some happening through the year but the majority in the academic year from September to June.
But to return to that emergency room with its legendary long waits for those injured and needing medical assistance. What if there was a cart of books rolled down that passageway and into those individual rooms to those able to read? What if once a week a volunteer from the Book Swap at the Holly Hill Recycling Center would bring over say 20 books for that cart. That Greenwich Book Shed receives up to 200,000 book donations a year. Online it states, “Many regulars treat the shed as a lending library, and also take books for schools or elderly neighbors…”
But let us not forget that weekly newspaper, the Greenwich Sentinel! Might every Friday a bunch of Sentinels be placed on that book cart. A meaningful addition to learn what is going on in their Greenwich hometown, a helpful distraction for sure. And surely Donna Leon would agree this is a good idea!
