Last side trips to Vigata
“Inspector Montalbano is now an orphan, and 60 million Italians are orphans with him.”
Over the past several years I’ve developed a ritual when taking a vacation in Europe. I add a side trip to Vigata. It’s a simple process: Buy the latest of Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano novels to be translated into English. Resist the temptation to start reading it until the day of departure. Begin the book on the plane.
Inspector Montalbano, his colleagues on the police force in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata and the assorted eccentrics who live there, or are just passing through, make excellent traveling companions.
I finished one Montalbano novel on the rooftop terrace of the Musee d’Orsay. I finished another on the balcony of a hotel overlooking Rome and another on the Praça do Comércio in Lisbon. But when I reach the end of a Montalbano mystery, I always miss Vigata.
Like millions of others, I’m only going to get to make a few more such trips. Andrea Camilleri died last week at the age of 93.
As The Guardian pointed out in its obituary “Had Andrea Camilleri died in his 50s, his obituary would certainly not have been published in The Guardian.” By then Camilleri was merely an accomplished stage and television director and writer of some obscure historical novels.
But then he decided he needed a way to impose discipline on his approach to writing. So he decided to try writing a mystery novel. He was 68 or 69 (accounts differ) when his first Montalbano novel, The Shape of Water, was published in 1994. Two years later came his second, and I think, his best The Terra Cotta Dog. He had planned to stop there, but his publisher persuaded him to continue. Now there are 27 Montalbano novels and several collections of short stories.
And, since 1999, there’s been a splendid television series, Il Commissario Montalbano, produced for Italian public broadcaster RAI. I wrote about the series here. It’s available on the MHZ Choice streaming service.
So, by the time he was in his 70s, Camilleri had become an overnight sensation. The books have been translated in more than 30 languages and the television series regularly draws 10 million viewers in Italy, (roughly the equivalent of an American audience of more than 50 million).
Translation is an art in itself, since Camilleri wrote partly in Italian, partly in Sicilian — and he threw in words he made up himself. But Stephen Sartarelli does an ingenious job of bringing the English versions to life. Thanks to Sartarelli, I suspect that little if anything is lost in translation.
RAI interrupted regular programming to announce Camilleri’s death, and devoted 80 percent of its main news program to the story.
Now, writes Prof. Barbara Pezzotti, a lecturer in Italian Studies at Monash University in Australia, “Inspector Montalbano is now an orphan, and 60 million Italians are orphans with him.”
Pezzotti’s is the best analysis I’ve seen of the novels’ appeal:
Unlike the tormented and often self-destructive protagonists of many northern European crime stories, Montalbano is a lover of life and good food. He has a stormy long-distance relationship with his girlfriend, Livia, who lives in Italy’s north. He has his flaws: he is sometimes grumpy and short-tempered — and many readers can easily identify with him — but he is an honest policeman who, with great sensitivity and empathy, brings justice to the fictional village of Vigata, modelled on Camilleri’s hometown, Porto Empedocle.
The author’s humour also contributed to the series’ success. In the 1960s, Camilleri’s literary predecessor, Sicilian Leonardo Sciascia, used crime fiction to denounce the mafia and its grip on the economy of the island, writing bleak stories where mafiosi triumphed.
Thirty years later, Camilleri wrote stories about an evolving Sicily where new generations rebel against criminal organisations and legality is finally possible. … Camilleri overcame an enduring stereotype in literature and cinema of Sicily as an immobile society prey to violence and the code of silence.
Montalbano’s politics
Many of the Montalbano novels are infused with Camilleri’s political sensibilities. In one, Montalbano considers quitting the force after seeing how Italian police brutalized protesters at a G8 summit. In his most recent to be published in English, The Other End of the Line, Camilleri attacks the current Italian government’s brutality toward immigrants. That created controversy when the television version aired earlier this year.
Pezzotti writes that Camilleri
“…belonged to a group of politically engaged authors, such as the Swede Henning Mankell (1948–2015), Spaniard Manuel Vazquez Montalban (1939–2003) and France’s Jean-Claude Izzo (1945–2000). … The old guard of European crime fiction strongly believed in the power of literature and the role of crime fiction as a political watchdog.”
In fact, Camilleri named Montalbano after Montalban
No “Reichenbach Falls”
The Montalbano television series probably can continue for quite awhile. Many of the television episodes are constructed by combining two short stories, and there seem to be a lot of those left. [UPDATE, JUNE 18, 2021: But apparently not. MHz Choice says the series episode it will air on July 6, 2021 is the last.]
But there won’t be too many more side trips to Vigata. Of the 27 novels, three remain to be translated into English — and that includes one written 13 years ago.
Camilleri decided he did not want any chance of a “Reichenbach Falls” for Montalbano. The series would end with Camilleri’s death. So he wrote the final installment in 2006. It’s been locked in a safe at his publisher’s office ever since. I don’t know if it’s been translated. UPDATE: May, 2021: It has. It will be published in the United States in September.
“Sherlock Holmes was recovered” he told an interviewer in 2012, “but it will not be possible to recover Montalbano. In that last book, he’s really finished.”
There is better literature than the Montalbano series. There are better mysteries. Novels in Scottish writer Christopher Bookmyre’s Jack Parlabane series can be a tour de force of thriller, mystery, political satire and farce all rolled into one. And more than once they’ve prompted me to reread the earliest chapters to marvel at his sleight-of-hand. But when I finish one, it doesn’t leave me missing Scotland.
I’m sorry I won’t be able to spend much more time in Vigata.
