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| Len is doing great cooking again. |
This Week’s Mona Lisa
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| Did you say art? You must mean Mona Lisa. |
Recent Reading
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| I lost interest in the middle of this thriller. |
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The thirteen stories in this collection vary quite a lot, and several of them differ from the novels of Louise Erdrich that I have read. I enjoyed them all. I’ll pick one example, the story titled “Borsalino,” in reference to a particular type of hat that the narrator wears.
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The hat: “a soft brown Borsalino, with a wide grosgrain ribbon band
and a generous brim.” It has a very special hat band made of snakeskin. |
This story takes place in Venice during two trips that the narrator takes, quite a few years apart. On the first trip when she’s a student, the narrator is befriended by a local man named Enzo, who offers to be a guide…
“So I took the thief’s tour. In through cracks in walls, squeezing around or climbing through damaged gates, we wandered through ornate gardens and empty apartments. Enzo seemed to know everyone who was keeping the city going, from the bakers to the garbage collectors. He knew his way into shuttered shops, the secret areas of churches, cloisters, ancient palazzi. Servants let us sleep on couches hidden from sunlight, under sheets, or wander in the bishop’s residence. We ate bread and cheese in tiny private gardens, sipped from a bottle liberated from a merchant’s fabled wine cellar. Over the days we went to the islands. In Murano, he blew glass with the glass-blowers. In San Lazzaro degli Armeni, he greeted a monk who let us into the library. Enzo spoke, in a language I had never heard before, to a mummy, tranquil and stern, a neighbor of the monk. We went to Isola San Michele, the island of the dead, and wandered into the oldest part of the cemetery, filled with blackened angels and tilted vaults.” (p.99)
It’s clear that Enzo is very special and has a strange place in the world of the cemetery — especially in “ a cozy mausoleum” where he shows her an old mattress in a crypt. And seems to sleep there. “My hat rattled, as if the snakeskin in the hatband had come alive and moved.”
On the second trip, things are a little different. The author has her husband and children with her, and they start the day normally…
‘I went back to Venice another time. It was about sixteen years later, over a decade into my first marriage. We went with two of our children, both girls, seven and eight years old. I had them keep a travel diary for their younger sister, still at home, just a toddler. In the hotel where we stayed, near the Accademia Bridge, a lavish breakfast was served. The girls listed everything on one page, drew it on another. They were enthralled by the tall glasses of blood orange juice. They drew the arrays of folded meats and pallid cheeses, the puffy pastries, pots of jam, giving each a letter grade.” (p. 101)
But then things turn dark. Enzo, she learns, is not human. He’s a spirit that has lived in Venice for centuries. Further, the hat, which she’s brought with her on this trip too, turns out to be a kind of a magic hat, especially its snakeskin hat band.
All the stories have something special in them.
Blog post © 2026 mae sander
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