Grace note
© Peter Rozovsky 2009"After turning the key in the lock, he had, for all intents and purposes, opened the door onto nothingness: a horrific explosion, triggered by an ingenious device linking the door to an explosive charge, literally pulverized the house, the businessman, and his wife, Giuseppa née Tagliafico. Investigations, the newsman added, were proving difficult, since Mr. Brancato had a clean record and did not appear in any way involved with the Mafia.
"Montalbano turned off the television and started whistling Schubert's Eighth, the `Unfinished.' It came out splendidly, he didn't miss a note."— Andrea Camilleri, The Terra-Cotta Dog
Labels: Andrea Camilleri, Franz Schubert, Italy, music, Sicily
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 2:32 AM
4 Comments:
Vey nice, indeed.
You can feel the sarcastic, knowing grin in the last sentence of the first paragraph.
Among other things, this must be one of the sharpest invocations of music in any fiction. (A quibbler might suggest that the joke is on the piece's title rather than on the music itself, and he would be right. But the hell with him. The passage works.)
I like Camilleri more and more the more I read an reread him.
I am going to have to read me some Camilleri, methinks...
I endorse that suggestion. I've generally liked the more recent Montalbano novels better than the earlier ones, but this one, the second in the series, was sharper and funnier than I remembered from the first time I read it. I'm ready to put Camilleri in my personal pantheon.
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