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Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘The Master,’ she said, in English, and Brunetti watched her go all misty-eyed, the way she always did when she talked about Henry James. Did it make sense, he wondered, to be jealous? Jealous of a man who, it seemed to him from what Paola had said about him, not only couldn’t decide what his nationality was, but couldn’t seem to decide what sex he was, either?
Henry James.Paola's literary hero
‘He said it in response to someone who asked him, late in his life, what he had learned by all his experience.’ Brunetti knew what he was meant to do. He did it. ‘What did he say?’ ‘“Be kind and then be kind and then be kind,”’ she said in English. The temptation proved too strong for Brunetti. ‘With or without commas?’
Henry James quote
The physical causes of violent death seldom revealed secrets: they lay, if anywhere, in the motive.
Physical causes of murder are usually less complicated than motive
‘Sorry, Giulio, but I’ve had people telling me all day that I ought not to talk ill of the dead.’ ‘If we can’t talk ill of the dead, who can we talk ill of?’ Carrara asked with surprising good sense.
Talking badly of the dead
No Italian would bother to ask why the shipments were not made directly to Germany. The Germans, it was rumoured, saw the law as something to be obeyed, unlike the Italians, who saw it as something first to be fathomed and then evaded.
Italian attitudes toward The Law
polentoni
Slang Northerners?
He pushed these memories away. It was all beyond him now, taken into the hands of another agency of the law, and he could no longer affect the outcome in any way. He’d had enough of death and violence, enough of pilfered beauty and the lust for the perfect. He longed for springtime and its many imperfections.
The outcome of the case
