The Paper Moon, or Salvo Montalbano, vulnerable detective

After reading Andrea Camilleri's The Patience of the Spider last year, I wrote that Camilleri was giving his protagonist, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, "an ever more tender and sympathetic view of the world."

Last week, I was pleased to note than an Italian blogger had made a similar observation apropos of that novel and of Camilleri's most recently translated Montalbano book, The Paper Moon, back when the latter was published in its original language in 2005.

With the aid once again of my scraps of Italian and a moderately trusty translation program, I translated part the discussion as follows:

"Which Montalbano do we find in this book? A man whom Camilleri is aging gradually, book after book, making him more reflective, as in The Patience of the Spider."

The writer notes Montalbano's worries about aging in the new book, in particular his realizing with alarm that his memory is not what it once was. It is significant, though, that the resourceful Montalbano deals with the problem by taking notes and writing himself letters. This is of a piece with narrative devices from earlier novels, such as his mentally casting a difficult case in the form of a script in order better organize his thoughts, but it also shows more of the touching vulnerability I found in The Patience of the Spider.

The new book takes Montalbano up against Italian political corruption, of course. But, as is characteristic of the series, love, obsession and other human perversities are the real occasions of the inspector's wonderment. Once again, he is vulnerable and crotchety at the same time, which is somehow especially touching and makes him more believable than if he'd been one or the other rather than both.

What other detectives are vulnerable without tumbling into cliché?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Italian crime fiction

Andrea Camilleri's humor

I stopped by Philadelphia's press club after a bad night of work at my newspaper this week (though "bad night of work at my newspaper" is a pleonasm – unless one works there during the day). An acquaintance of mine from Italy's Lazio region sat at the bar chatting with two friends who the bartender told me were from Rome.

I understand enough Italian to pick out a word here and there and even to follow the thread of a conversation if I concentrate hard enough, which I could not do because a vacuous blowhard with an extremely loud voice sat across the bar from the Romans commiserating with his female friend about cruise ships and Jamaica.

Not only did he hear what she was saying, but he knew where she was coming from. If he had decided to not even go there, I would have slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, ordered him to shut up, and paid for their drinks and their taxi home.

What does this have to do with Andrea Camilleri and his protagonist, the unparalleled Inspector Salvo Montalbano? Montalbano also hates clichés and psychobabbling banality. Here's Montalbano on the phone with his lover, Livia, in The Smell of the Night (titled The Scent of the Night for delicate-nosed U.K. readers):

"`Come on Livia, don't get upset, try to be patient.'

"`You would try the patience of a saint!'

"Oh, God, not another cliche! Sow your wild oats, count your chickens before they hatch, or eat like a horse, when you're not putting the cart first!

"He realized he couldn't put up with this conversation much longer. Aside from the clichés and stock phrases, he couldn't stand the sallies of cheap psychoanalysis that Livia all too often liked to indulge in -- the kind of stuff you get in American movies ... "

This by itself would be good enough to make Montalbano an enjoyable version of the gruff but loveable old uncle. But what follows elevates him to something like a great comic creation. As he and Livia argue, parry, thrust, and make plans, Montalbano muses upon their strange contentiousness of their phone conversations:

"The best of it was that this animosity remained independent of the unshakable intensity of their relationship. But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average, at least once every four sentences? Maybe, thought the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old ... we feel ever more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us."

That's lovely, I think, an aching and tender insight, and its resonance grows when one reflects that Camilleri was about eighty years old when the novel was published in 2005. But the scene gets better:

"As he was reasoning along these lines (and he liked this line of reasoning, as it was reassuring and banal, like the sayings one finds on the little slip of paper inside Baci Perugina chocolates) ..."

Bellissimo! What a perfect topper! Montalbano is irritable, Montalbano is wistful, and Montalbano slips with comfort into banalities just as bad as those he finds so maddening in Livia. What a perfect little parable of human relations! Has anyone written about love with such tenderness and humorous understanding?

(For more rhapsodizing about Andrea Camilleri and Salvo Montalbano, read Uriah Robinson, the King of Camilleri, on his Crime Scraps blog.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007Technorati tags:
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Italian crime fiction

It's never too late

The always valuable Euro Crime news site links to the Independent's recent interview with Andrea Camilleri, author of seven novels to date about the Sicilian police inspector Salvo Montalbano.

The interview opens with a discussion of a memorable Montalbano outburst in The Scent of the Night, the sixth of the seven books. Later, Camilleri reveals that Montalbano is based to a great extent on his own father. He discusses his attitudes toward the Sicialian language, and he shares some perhaps surprising ideas about the role of the Mafia in his novels.

But what really caught my eye is something that ought to encourage any crime-fiction readers who are also would-be crime-fiction writers: Montalbano was 70 years old when he published his first Montalbano book.

(Camilleri/Montalbano central in the blogosphere these days is Crime Scraps. Norm/Uriah, the curator of Crime Scraps, is a Montalbano nut.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Salvo Montalbano looks back at the 1960s

Excursion to Tindari, fifth of Andrea Camilleri's novels featuring Inspector Salvo Montalbano (eleven of the books have been translated into English to date), contains an assertion of political maturity and independence surprising from a man of the left who has remained steadfastly so.

Montalbano is musing over the news that a friend from the heyday of European radicalism, has been named president of the second-most important bank in Sicily:

"What Montalbano remembered most from those days was a poem by Pasolini, defending the police against the students at Valle Giulia in Rome. All his friends had spat on those verses, whereas he, Montalbano, had tried to defend them. `But it's a beautiful poem.' If they hadn't restrained him, Carlo Martello would've broken his nose with one of his deadly punches. ... At any rate, over the years he'd seen his friends, the legendary comrades from 68, all turn `reasonable.' And by dint of reason, their abstract fury had softened and finally settled into concrete acquiescence."

In the U.S. confessions of radicals-turned-conservatives are an established sub-genre, I think. Less familiar are figures such as Montalbano (and Camilleri himself, perhaps) who can look back on the excesses of the 1960s, heap scorn on the perpetrators of those excesses, and remain a sardonic, committed man of the left.

Dominique Manotti's novels also cast a critical eye on the afterlife of 1960s activism. What other crime writers do this? What is their attitude toward those old days? Repentant? Scornful? Forgiving?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

The Dance of the Seagull: How Camilleri gets better and better

Fifteen books into his Inspector Salvo Montalbano series (with several titles yet to translated from Italian/Sicilian/Camillerian into English), Andrea Camilleri manages both to offer readers the pleasures they've grown to expect and to vary the ingredients and add enough emotional depth to keep the series from growing tired.

In Book Fourteen (The Age of Doubt), for example, two sentences in, and Salvo is already cursing the saints. In the fifteenth and latest novel, Dance of the Seagull, Salvo does not curse the saints until Page 104, and for me the deferred pleasure is like that gained by letting a vintage port age just a few years more. ("Cursing the saints" is translator Stephen Sartarelli's ingenious and entertaining rendering of an untranslatable Sicilian verb. In a comment to an earlier blog post, Sartarelli tells Detectives Beyond Borders the origins of "cursing the saints.")

Camilleri has said he "deliberately decided to smuggle in a critical commentary on my times," but the jabs, while sharper than ever, have become more human over time. The exasperated vitriol aimed at government and Mafia remains, but now laying bare more than in earlier books the human consequences of the misdeeds at which he rails.

Indeed, an increasingly human touch makes this one of the rare long-running crime series that arguably grow stronger with time. Camilleri was 68 years old when the first book appeared, and he recently turned 87. The titles available in English have taken Salvo from his forties to age 57, complete with amusing and touching descriptions of the aches and pains of aging.

In recent books Salvo has grown more tender toward his lover, Livia, and more appreciative of what his colleagues mean to him. In The Dance of the Seagull, the humanity takes the form of Salvo's new revulsion at the savagery whose results he witnesses as he investigates a pair of murders, and the introspection and empathy manifest themselves from the beginning. (The title refers to a seagull's dance of death that Salvo witnesses from his seaside home and that haunts him throughout the novel. Camilleri integrates the dream into the mystery more skillfully that he done in earlier books. He's beginning to get the hang of this Montalbano thing.)

Fans of the excellent Italian television series based on the Montalbano novels and starring Luca Zingaretti, telecast with English subtitles on MHz Networks and available on DVD, will enjoy this little argument between Salvo and Livia:

"`Well, I wouldn't want them to be shooting.' 

" `What are you talking about? Shooting what?' 

"`I wouldn't want to run into a film crew shooting an episode of that television series right as we're walking around there ... They film around there, you know.' 

"`What the hell do you care?' 

"`What do you mean, what the fell do I care? And what if I find myself face to face with the actor who plays me? ... What's his name—Zingarelli ...' 

"`His name's Zingaretti, stop pretending you don't know Zingarelli's a dictionary. But I repeat: What do you care? How can you still have these childish complexes at your age?' 

"`What's age got to do with it?' 

"`Anyway, he doesn't look the least bit like you.' 

"`That's true.' 

"`He's a lot younger than you.' 

"Enough of this bullshit about age. Livia was obsessed!"

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

On translating Andrea Camilleri

Earlier this year, I linked to an article by Stephen Sartarelli about translating Andrea Camilleri into English.

I singled out Sartarelli's assessment that Camilleri:

"writes in a language that he has been the first to grace with literary status. An invented language, in the sense that, though made up of existing manners of speech and writing, it has never before been assembled in quite this fashion."

The article turns up as a preface to Does the Night Smell the Same in Italy and in English Speaking Countries? An Essay on Translation: Camilleri in English by Emanuela Gutkowski.

The book is marred by a tendency to weigh down obvious statements with citations not just in footnotes but in the body of the text. If you can ignore that academic affectation, Gutkowski, a lecturer in English and translation studies at the University of Catania in Sicily, has interesting things to say to readers of Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano mysteries.

Her numerous quotations from Camilleri's L'odore della notte and its translation as The Smell of the Night (The Scent of the Night for delicate UK readers) highlight the sorts of choices a translator must make when literal renderings would make no sense in the "reception" language. Thus "Ho avuto una botta di culo incredibile, Mimi" becomes "I hit the goddamn jackpot, Mimi."

"The expression cannot be translated," Gutkowski writes, as the literal translation `I had a terrible ass-hit' appears to be nonsense." Sartarelli's choice is anything but nonsense, and he gets the tone just right.

Sartareli made wise choices as well in areas of linguistic untranslatablity, where Montalbano's distinctively Sicilian manipulations of grammar lack precise English equivalents. Such a locution, says, Gutkowski, is Montalbano's introduction of himself by "Montalbano sono" (literally "Montalbano I am") rather than the standard "I am Montalbano" or "It's Montalbano."

His choice of words thus violates normal word order in the interest of a strange, self-conscious formality. Just try getting that across in translation. Sartarelli's choice: "Montalbano the name." That, too, captures the tone, I'd say.

And then there's Catarella, Montalbano's thick, excitable, language-mangling colleague. I'd had ambivalent feelings about Sartarelli's rendering his speech in an English full of malapropisms and misspellings. Seeing his version beside the original, I appreciate the sensitivity he has to the strange, clanky sound of Catarella's speech.

"Vossia di pirsona pirsonalmente è?" becomes "Is that you yourself in person?" which both preserves the sense and offers an elegant substitution (you/yourself) for Catarella's cracked alliteration.

=================

Camilleri makes artful use of clichés, mostly to show how they drive Montalbano nuts. I wrote about those clichés and what Sartarelli does with them here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

California dreaming

I'm going to California (for Bouchercon 2010); Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano is doing the dreaming, in The Track of Sand, twelfth of the Montalbano mysteries to be translated into English.

Dream scenes in movies are generally embarrassments; in books they're merely obvious. But Camilleri, who often opens his novels with Montalbano waking in the morning, shows here that he knows how to write a dream. Montalbano's dreams here feel like dreams. It helps that the crime sets the story in motion is full of material ripe for dreams: a horse, a beach, sand (as in the stuff you get bogged down running in...slower...slower...sinking deeper).

So the dream can have something to do with the mystery Montalbano is trying to solve without being clunkingly obvious about it.

***

Longtime readers of this charming series know that Camilleri likes to have Montalbano reading a mystery as he tries to relax. This time Montalbano thinks about Giorgio Scerbanenco; Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the creators of Martin Beck; and that newcomer Henning Mankell. Here's my favorite example:

"He got into bed and started reading one of the Swedish books he had bought. Its protagonist was a colleague of his, Inspector Martin Beck, whose manner of investigation he found very appealing. When he had finished the novel and turned out the light, it was four o'clock in the morning."

Readers for whom the running gag of Montalbano's inability to finish reading a Simenon novel in The Smell of the Night will find that especially noteworthy. I find it touching, and it's hard to imagine a warmer author-to-author tribute.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Camilleri's Italian covers

My reading of and about Andrea Camilleri has led me to a Web site that offers a gallery of his Italian covers and links to tantalizing summaries of books not yet translated into English.

Camilleri's eleventh novel about Inspector Salvo Montalbano has just been published in English as The Wings of the Sphinx; the site offers covers and summaries of fourteen novels plus two collections of Montalbano stories, an omnibus edition and a non-Montalbano book.

One of the novels takes the investigation into Montalbano's beloved Mediterranean, "the most marine of Montalbano's investigations," according to Camilleri.

A collection of long stories, La prima indagine de Montalbano (Montalbano's First Investigation), takes the reader to a time when "Montalbano is 35 years old, an adult but still professionally naive and not so astute ..."

Now, there's something for Camilleri's readers to look forward to.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

You eat like four millstones! — The truth behind Camilleri's clichés

I wrote last year (here and here) about an amusing scene in Andrea Camilleri's The Smell of the Night (published in the U.K. as The Scent of the Night). Camilleri's protagonist, Salvo Montalbano, seethes when his girlfriend, Livia, tells him that "You would try the patience of a saint!"

"Oh, God, not another cliché!" Montalbano thinks. "Sow your wild oats, count your chickens before they hatch, or eat like a horse, when you're not putting the cart first!"

The scene is funny and tender. I also realized that its original-language version must challenge translators. A cliché or, indeed, almost any idiom cannot be translated literally if it is to retain its flavor. What, I wondered, were the Italian originals behind the clichés that so exasperated Montalbano?

Thanks to the delicious blog Briciole, I now know. The Italian for what English speakers mean by "counting one's chickens before they hatch," Briciole reports, is vendere la pelle dell'orso prima di averlo ucciso, literally "to sell the pelt before killing the bear."

That's a good expression and worth repeating. My favorite, though, is the Italian version of "to eat like a horse": mangiare a quattro palmenti, literally "to eat like four millstones." Even better is this variant: macinare a quattro palmenti, "to grind like four millstones, i.e., like a mill that has four millstones." That's voracious. And now you all have something new to say at your next family feast.

I find the specificity of the four beguiling, and I will make every effort to introduce this delightful expression into English.

Mille grazie to Briciole and its keeper, Simona, whose complete comment you can read here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Camilleri: The mystery within

I've enjoyed the increasingly tender, sympathetic world view that Andrea Camilleri gives his protagonist, Inspector Salvo Montalbano.

I've haven't read the entire series, of which ten novels have been translated into English, and the ones I have read, I've read out of series order. But I'll make a tentative guess that Camilleri began to emphasize the personal, tender touch with Excursion to Tindari, fifth in the series.

Montalbano, the novels' third-person point-of-view character, is as much a mystery, a puzzle, and a surprise to himself as the murders he is called upon to solve. "He realized he was awake," the novel begins, "as his mind was functioning logically and not following the absurd labyrinths of dreams." The first subject of Montalbano's investigation is Montalbano.

Perhaps the most mischievous personal touch is Camilleri's choice of the mystery novel that Montalbano tries to read but is continually distracted from ever finishing. In The Smell of the Night, that book was by Georges Simenon. Here the novel is by the author for whom Camilleri named Montalbano: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. This is a puckish yet heartfelt an act of tribute and self-reference as I can think of in crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Andrea Camilleri's latest

My fondness for Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Salvo Montalbano grows as the elderly Camilleri lends his middle-aged protagonist an ever more tender and sympathetic view of the world.

In The Patience of the Spider, the eighth Montalbano novel translated into English, Montalbano delves into the disappearance of a young woman and its effect on the political hopes of the man apparently responsible for her kidnapping.

Montalbano is moved to tears — he conceals them — by the presence of his lover, Livia, and stricken with pangs of tenderness and an odd sense of loneliness and relief when she leaves at the end of her stay. He is shocked by the news that a friend — a man his own age! — has become a grandfather. He is frightened to panic in the presence of a dying woman, yet cheered by the sharp mind of the missing young woman's boyfriend, who declares that he wants to be a police officer and, thinks Montalbano, would make a good one. And at all times, he reflects on his own reactions.

Camilleri's sympathy abounds for minor characters in difficult situations and even for the wife of the apparent kidnapper, after she is accosted and assaulted by a gang of respectable women angry at her husband's conduct.

The apparent kidnapper is a slick and ambitious engineer who benefits both from Italy's traditional political corruption and from the new varieties enabled by Silvio Berlusconi. (The explanatory notes by the translator, Stephen Sartarelli, are especially helpful here.) But corruption is not the devil. Think love, both thwarted and realized, revenge, and yearning hope for redemption, and you'll be closer to the tone of this moving novel.
===========

I could be imagining this, but this translation seems to retain more Sicilian dialect and sayings than do previous volumes in the series. One example: "`Cu al sangu sò fa mali / mori mangiatu da li maiali,' or `He who harms his own flesh and blood / shall be eaten by pigs and die."

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Italian crime fiction

Sex for Salvo

What does the future hold for Salvo Montalbano? More sex.

Author Andrea Camilleri tells an Italian interviewer that as his protagonist moves into his sixties, after a life too full of nettlesome chastity, he realizes opportunities passed up may now be lost for good and so begins a much more active sex life.

In a metaphor that transcends barriers of language, Camilleri says Salvo will, "one might say, shoot his last cartridge."

That's just a livelier continuation of something the sensitive Camilleri has incorporated in novels such as The Wings of the Sphinx and The Patience of the Spider: Montalbano's increasing consciousness of his own mortality.

The interview is not all sex. Camilleri also talks about the friendly editorial blackmail that led him to continue the Montalbano series beyond Book Two, The Terra-Cotta Dog. (Eleven of the series are now available in English.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Camilleri in my newspaper

My review of The Dance of the Seagull, latest of Andrea Camilleri's novels about Salvo Montalbano to appear in English, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

"The title," quoth the Inquirer, "refers to a seagull's dance of death that Salvo witnesses from his seaside home and that haunts him and his dreams throughout the novel. Camilleri integrates this dream into the mystery more skillfully than he has done in earlier books. He's beginning to get the hang of this Montalbano thing.

"... introspection and empathy need not imply surrender or resignation. Indeed, Salvo not only solves the murders and arrests the murderers, but he also manages to exact a bit of revenge from a powerful target."

Spoiler alert: Salvo does not curse the saints until Page 104.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

How do authors change their series over time?

Five months ago, I asked how series characters change over time. This time I'll focus on their creators. Recently I've noted that Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Salvo Montalbano have become more sympathetic and tender as they've grown older. Earlier, I discovered Colin Watson's delightful tendency to apply slightly spicier touches of naughty words as his Flaxborough Chronicles series progressed.

Those are two of the more creative ways I've seen of changing a series just enough to keep it interesting while retaining the features that made it distinctive in the first place. How do your favorite crime-fiction authors do it?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Comic relief and tension-breakers: Two examples, and a question for readers

I've recently read two very different crime novels that used a similar device for comic effect. Andrea Camilleri's The Paper Moon and Blood of the Wicked, by Leighton Gage, punctuate their narratives with humorous, sometimes absurd confrontations (or avoidance thereof) between the protagonist and his superior officer.

Camilleri's running joke is a constantly postponed meeting between Inspector Salvo Montalbano and the commissioner he despises. In Gage's grim story about murder and the fight for land reform in northern Brazil, the one comic note is the phone calls between detective Mario Silva and his dim, pompous supervisor, or director, who insists on being updated on Silva's investigation "twice daily, at noon and at six."

Camilleri makes the reasons for the missed meeting grow wilder and more elaborate. Gage has the harried director grow more and more exasperated, enumerating his woes as the news gets worse, the bodies pile up, and the possible repercussions for his own career grow ever more worrisome. The phone calls, made comic by their regularity, begin to affect Silva even when they don't arrive. Each author repeats the joke but varies it just enough each time to keep the reader interested, something like a musical theme and successive variations.

Before I offer one example each from The Paper Moon and Blood of the Wicked, you get your chance to weigh in. What running jokes do crime novelists use to add humor or release tension? How do they hold the reader's interest when repeating a joke throughout a novel?
=========================================

"He said that 'cause they're having the furinal services for that sinator that died and seeing as how the c'mishner gotta be there poisonally in poisson, atta furinal. I mean, the c'mishner can't come to see youse like he said he was was gonna do. Unnastand, chief?"

"Perfectly, Cat."

– The Paper Moon

"Good evening, Director."

"Silva?"

It wasn't the director.

– Blood of the Wicked

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Brazilian crime fiction

Andrea Camilleri, heart and sole

Andrea Camilleri and his Inspector Salvo Montalbano have come to feel like old friends whom I am always happy to see and to report on to our mutual acquaintances.

In The Potter's Field, thirteenth novel in the series, Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid.  Out of bed, his choice of reading matter, always a delight to Camilleri's readers, is a special treat this time. (OK, I'll give it away: Salvo, whose reading in previous novels has included Georges Simenon and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, this time chooses a novel by Andrea Camilleri.) 

The political gibes, as barbed as ever, are delivered with greater concision even as they ripen into a kind of weariness at the state of the world, though the gibes are as funny as always.  Camilleri has deepened and mellowed his protagonist's view.

In previous books, this has taken the form of increasing tenderness in Salvo's regard for his distant lover, Livia. Here, he feels the pain of a friend's betrayal more sharply than a younger Salvo would have, and his kinship with his fellow creatures even turns him briefly off seafood after he admires the fish at an aquarium in Genoa. (Can I have veal milanese? he asks a waiter. "Sure," the waiter replies,  "if you go to Milan." Salvo settles for an excellent plate of fried sole.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Andrea Camilleri in my newspaper

My review of The Potter's Field, thirteenth of Andrea Camilleri's Sicilian crime novels about Police Inspector Salvo Montalbano and the first in which Salvo goes to bed with Ingrid, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Typically for a Montalbano novel,” I write, “the investigation becomes one of mob connections, heated emotions, and family secrets. But crime, investigation, and solution are the least of the Montalbano novels. Every word is a commentary, sometimes wry, sometimes righteously angry, sometimes touching, on the protagonist’s political, social, professional, and personal worlds. To choose just one typical example, `Ingrid’s husband was a known ne’er-do-well, so it was only logical that he should turn to politics.'”

Read the full review, and learn how to impress your server the next time you visit an Italian restaurant.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Happy Birthday, Andrea Camilleri

Andrea Camilleri, whose work includes the Sicily-based novels about Inspector Salvo Montalbano, turns 87 years old today.

Camilleri and translator Stephen Sartarelli won the CWA International Dagger award this year for The Potter's Field, thirteenth book in the Montalbano series. Book 15, The Dance of the Seagull (La danza del gabbiano) arrives in February 2013, and several in the series have yet to be translated.

Camilleri's non-Montalbano novel The Hunting Season is also due for English-language publication early next year. Buon compleanno, Andrea Camilleri!

===============

(Here a sympathetic interview with Camilleri along with a review of his career from the Guardian. Here how visitors can follow the Montalbano trail. And here's the Camilleri Fan Club site, which includes, among much interesting material in several languages, short articles in Italian by Camilleri's translators. including Sartarelli.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Win Andrea Camilleri's latest (and give yourself one less reason to curse the saints)

Two sentences into The Age of Doubt, fourteenth of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano mysteries and newly available in English, and Salvo is already cursing the saints:

"He had just fallen asleep after a night worse than almost any other in his life, when a thunderclap as loud as a cannon blast fired two inches from his ear startled him awake. He sat up with a jolt, cursing the saints."

That has long been Salvo's favorite expression of disgust as well as one of mine, and its occurrence this early bodes well for the book. Thanks to the people of Penguin, one lucky U.S. reader can win a copy of The Age of Doubt and curse the saints along with Salvo. All that reader has to do is answer the following question correctly:

What is Salvo's favorite restaurant? (Hint: The restaurant is named for a saint.)

***

While you're scratching your head and cursing the saints, why not weigh in on your favorite invective in crime fiction, read my review of Camilleri's previous Montalbano book, or get hold of Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction, which includes an essay about Camilleri by your humble blogkeeper?

***

We have a winner! Fred in Ohio knew that Salvo's favorite restaurant is the Trattoria San Calogero. He wins a copy of The Age of Doubt, just in time for several festivals of San Calogero in Sicily over the next few weeks. Felicitazióni e buon appetito. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Thought for food

Little says as much about cultural differences as contrasting attitudes toward food. To crime writers from North America or from Europe's colder countries, food is an indicator of squalor, an objective correlative of bachelor solitude, or a sign of eccentricity.

Get closer to the Mediterranean, and food is life. Here's an example from The Terra-Cotta Dog, Andrea Camilleri's second novel about Inspector Salvo Montalbano. A sympathetic journalist friend rescues the hapless Montalbano from the ordeal of a press conference that follows the mysterious arrest of a mobster named Tano:

And just to make things even harder, there were the adoring eyes of Corporal Anna Ferrara, staring at him from the crowd.

Niccolò Zito, newsman from the Free Channel and a true friend, tried to rescue him from the quicksand in which he was drowning.

"Inspector, with your permission," said Zito. "You said you met Tano on your way back from Fiacca, where you'd been invited to eat a tabisca with friends. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"What is a tabisca?"

They'd eaten tabisca many times together. Zito was simply tossing him a life preserver. Montalbano seized it. Suddenly confident and precise, the inspector went into a detailed description of that extraordinary, multiflavored Italian pizza.

And there the chapter ends.

No authors combine food and crime with greater zest than Camilleri, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Jean-Claude Izzo. And few crime writers can have been as committed men of the left as these three. Izzo wrote with great sympathy of Marseilles' Arab population, and he worked for Pax Christi, a Roman Catholic peace movement. Vázquez Montalbán was active in anti-Franco movements. Camilleri joined the Italian Communist Party, and his books are filled with funny, bitter denunciations of Italian politicians and their service to the Mafia.

This must seem especially exotic to American crime-fiction readers, for whom the words food and mystery are likely to evoke thoughts of cozies with recipes, and for whom commitment of any kind is likely to seem antithetical to anything so hedonistic as good food.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009