Book Report: The Beautiful Mystery

7. Louise Penny, The Beautiful Mystery (2012) (3/22/22)

This book takes Chief Inspector Garmand and Inspector Beauvoir away from Montréal, never mind the village of Three Pines, to a remote monastery where a monk—the director of the twenty-four-voice choir practicing plainchant in honor of God—has been found murdered. The suspects are easy to keep track of, though the clues are few. One day in, Garmand's boss—and nemesis—arrives, stirring things up. The story refers us back to an incident in a previous book, to add an extra layer or two. 

All in all, it was a satisfying enough read, though a bit slow, with too little texture. I'm not sure I bought some of the premise—a long-lost book of Gregorian chants figures in, as does a recording these monks made that turned them from "long lost to the mists of time" into instantaneous celebrities. Some of the more philosophical points, like how to balance reliance on the will of God with material needs like roof tiles and heating ducts, or ego with community, were nicely done. The motive of the murderer I did not find convincing. 

The book ends with a crisis between Garmand and Beauvoir, so I am now keen to read the next in the series—which I am glad to see, from the coming-soon excerpt at the end, takes us back to Three Pines. There's plenty of texture in that little village.

By way of a sample passage from The Beautiful Mystery (a reference to plainchant), here's a conversation between Beauvoir and one of the monks, Antoine.

     "You don't like the monastery?" [asked Antoine].
     "Of course not. You do?"
     "I wouldn't be here if I didn't," said Frère Antoine. "I love Saint-Gilbert."
     It was such a simple statement it left Beauvoir dumbfounded. . . . No confusion, no ambuguity. It just was. Like the sky just was, and the stones just were. It was natural and absolute.
     "Why?" Beauvoir leaned forward. It was one of the questions he'd been dying to ask this monk with the beautiful voice and the body so like his own.
     "Why do I love it here? What's not to love?" Frère Antoine looked around his cell as though it was a suite at the Ritz in Montréal. "We play hockey in the winter, fish in the summer, swim in the lake and collect berries I know what each day will bring, and yet each day feels like an adventure. I get to hang around men who believe as I do, and yet are different enough to be endlessly fascinating. I live in the house of my Father and learn from my brothers. And I get to sing the words of God in the voice of God."
     The monk leaned forward, his strong hands resting on his knees.
     "Do you know what I found here?"
     Beauvoir shook his head.
     "I found peace."

Which is something that Beauvoir could use a dose of . . .

Book Report: Wilful Behaviour

6. Donna Leon, Wilful Behaviour (2001) (3/7/22)

I broke my rule of reading all the Donna Leon books in order, simply because this book jumped into my hands (I may have taken it recently from a Little Library?) and then because I figure there's not that much character development in these stories—they're mostly about Venice, and it's already got all the character it needs—so I wouldn't be missing anything crucial. I was right. This book was right in the same mold as the last few I've read (#s 1–5; this one is #11), which means there's some good food, there's an interesting geographical feature or two, there's corruption, and there are likable (as well as a few not-so-likable) characters. And of course there's a murder that must be solved. In this case, there is also some history stretching back to WWII. And art.

I'm afraid I didn't find the motive of the killer very compelling—or, more to the point, believable. But as always with the Commisssario Brunetti books, the mystery itself is somewhat beside the point. It's the richness of Venetian society that is the pleasure.

Here's the only passage that I dog-eared:

He recalled . . . something he had seen with Paola [Brunetti's wife], it must have been four years ago. They'd been at an exhibition of the paintings of the Colombian painter, Botero, she drawn to the wild exuberance of his portraits of fat, pie-faced men and women, all possessed of the same tiny rosebud mouth. In front of them was a teacher with a class of children who couldn't have been more than eight or nine. As he and Paola came into the last room of the exhibition, they heard the teacher say, 'Now, ragazzi, we're going to leave, but there are a lot of people here who don't want to be disturbed by our noise or talking. So what we're all going to do,' she went on, pointing to her own mouth, which she pursed up into a tight, tiny circle, 'is make la bocca di Botero.' Delighted, the children all placed single fingers on their lips and drew their mouths into tight imitations of those in the paintings as they tiptoed giggling from the room. Since then, whenever either he or Paola knew that to speak might be indiscreet, they invoked 'la bocca di Botero', and no doubt thus saved themselves a great deal of trouble, to make no mention of time and wasted energy.

Book Report: The Word for World Is Forest

5. Ursula Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest (1972) (2/24/22)

I finished this book a week ago now, and I've dragged my feet on logging a report. I think, mainly, because it's such a sad, sad book. Which has weighed on me.

It's a story of colonizers and oppressors (yumans), trying to take over a world of peaceful beings (the Athsheans, aka "creechies"—three-foot-tall fur-covered people with deep deep eyes) in order to mine their resources—in this case, trees, since the yumans have denuded their own home planet of Terra of anything resembling lumber—and to prepare the logged areas for future agriculturalist settlers. 

Sound familiar? Well, maybe except for the furry people. Though in Le Guin's world, these beings all evolved from the same pregenitor. 

Again: sound familiar?

I have been curious about Le Guin, and have read a few of her many, many books (including, recently, this one). Not too long ago I ran into someone's list of favorite books by Le Guin. The Word for World was number 1. I bit. 

(I just now googled such lists and came up with a few. The Word  is on some of them, but not all. Obviously, Le Guin, in her richness, means different things to different people. Here are a few of those lists: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Anyway, this one. It involves an awful opportunist (yuman, of course), a not awful anthropologist (also yuman: so we get the extremes on the scale), and Selver, an Athshean (for a while, an Athshean god), who does the unthinkable—murders—in order to save his home. 

This book is #5 in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, so it's part of an entire ecosystem. Apparently the books can stand alone, and no, I didn't feel at a disadvantage for not having read #s 1–4. But now I'm curious about them too.

From this book and the one I read not too long ago, I sense a great depth of thought and feeling, and of the notions of truth and justice, in Le Guin's approach to her imaginary worlds. These places are rife with conflict, but balance is achievable—though, at least in this case, at a serious cost. 

Here is a passage I flagged:

Like most Terrans on Terra, Lyubov [the anthropologist] had never walked among wild trees at all, never seen a wood larger than a city block. At first on Athshe he had felt oppressed and uneasy in the forest, stifled by its endless crowd and incoherence of trunks, branches, leaves in the perpetual greenish or brownish twilight. The mass and jumble of various competitive lives all pushing and swelling outward and upward toward light, the silence made up of many little meaningless noises, the total vegetable indifference to the presence of mind, all this had troubled him, and like the others he had kept to clearings and to the beach. But little by little he had begun to like it . . . and now after four years . . . he was completely at home under the trees, more so perhaps than anywhere else.
     He had also come to like the Athsheans' names for their own lands and places, sonorous two-syllabled words: Sornol, Tuntar, Eshreth, Eshsen—that was now Centralville—Endtor, Abtan, and above all Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.