I read the book The Golden Egg by Donna Leon, about a man who was found dead in Venice.  Years before, he had been taken in by the staff of a dry cleaner’s shop, and looked after when it was clear that he was not in tip-top mental shape.  The people who worked there were very upset that he had died. Only slowly did Commissario Brunetti and other officers discover that the man had not been retarded, and not deaf, but horribly abused by a family member, and therefore handicapped for life.

Someone had gotten rid of him, to “kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.” Someone thought to get benefit out of this man’s death. It’s a hard book, and I did not enjoy the troubles.  What I did enjoy of The Golden Egg were the first four pages.

Before the “action” starts, the Brunetti family are finishing supper when the daughter Chiara says, “And they all lived happily ever after.”  This is obviously the ending line of a story, and because these people love words and word play, they know that they must progress backwards to the beginning.  At the end of their made-up narration, they would look at it…  “to see if they fulfilled the family requirement for a story filled with cheap melodrama, cliché and outrageous characterization.”  And it did.

“Clorinda’s eyes met Guiseppe’s, and together they gazed down happily at the baby,” Paola said immediately.  Raffi said, “And so it was: the radical procedure left even the doctors who performed it astonished: indeed, for the first time in history, a baby had been successfully delivered from a man’s body.”

It took Brunetti but a moment to say, “As he was wheeled into the delivery room, Guiseppe had time to say, ‘She is nothing to me, my love. You are the only mother of my child.’ … “You brute,” Clorinda sobbed, “You betray me like this. What of my love? What of my honor?” WHEW!  I leave the narration there, and you will have to get the murder mystery from the Pine Bush Area Public Library, to find out what the rest of this “story” contains. I enjoyed the first four pages, but could not figure out how the made-up story there, had any “echo” in the sordid crime that took up most of the book. I seldom read a book for the sake of the very beginning, but that was the case here. Go ahead and see if you can crack The Golden Egg.