Sideways

I've just finished the latest in Donna Leon's series of novels featuring Venetian police Commissario Guido Brunetti, Suffer the Little Children. She always manages to comment on more than just Italian politics and mores, generally by tacit comparison left to her British, Canadian, and American readers - she doesn't write in Italian, after all, though she lives there and sets her novels there. But this book ... there are some zingers.

"There's a warrant," Marvilli [a Carabinieri captain] said.

"Issued by a judge in this city?"

After a long pause, Marvilli said, "I don't know that the judge is from this city, Commissario. But I know there is a warrant. We would never have done something like this without one -- not here and not in the other cities."

That was certainly likely enough, Brunetti agreed. The times when the police could break in anywhere without a warrant were not upon them, not yet. After all, this was not the United States.

Or

"He lives for his mother and the Church." Vianello [Brunetti's Inspectore] paused for some time. "And for priding himself, from what I've heard, on living a virtuous life and lamenting the fact that others do not. Though he'd probably get to be the one who defines virtue."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because he refuses to sell condoms in his pharmacy."

"What?"

"He can't refuse to sell prescription drugs, like contraceptive pills or the morning-after pill, but he has the right to refuse to sell rubbers, and that's his choice."

"In the third millennium?" Brunetti asked and buried his face in his hands for a moment.

Or this one, even more slantways:

Brunetti had no way of knowing if Italians were more gullible than other people, or if they were simply less informed. He had heard rumors of countries where there existed an independent press that provided accurate information and where the television was not all controlled by one man; indeed, his own wife [a university professor] had expressed belief in the existence of these marvels.

As the poet Burns said, Would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us.