The sage of Sicily
PAUL BAYLEY
Saturday 14 October 2006
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ndrea Camilleri is the most successful author in Italy, yet little more than a decade ago he was a virtually unknown septuagenarian who had written a handful of historical novels, including the intriguing Il birraio di Preston (The Brewer from Preston, 1995), set in his native Sicily. In 1994, however, he had invented Detective Inspector Salvo Montalbano in the novel La forma dell'acqua (The Shape of Water), and now both he and his hero are household names. It was never Camilleri's intention to write more than a couple of Montalbano books, and only when the second and most original story, Il cane di terracotta (The Terracotta Dog, 1996), was greeted with enthusiasm by critics and readers alike did Camilleri decide to put his middle-aged policeman through all sorts of increasingly complicated criminal hoops. The crimes are nothing if not topical: illegal immigrants, drug-peddling, prostitution, fraud and money-laundering. A recent villain is a doctor in thrall to the Mafia, who provides them with human hearts, livers and kidneys. In the small fictional Sicilian town of Vigàta, where Montalbano is based, the vilest things are seen to happen.
Camilleri, who was born in 1925 in Porto Empedocle, in the province of Agrigento, came to writing late, publishing his first book in 1978, when he was 53. Before then he had been an active member of the Communist party and a distinguished drama teacher and theatre director. He was also a television producer. For more than three decades he has worked in Rome, where he still lives with his Milanese wife. His phenomenal success is the cause of much amusement to him. The most recent Montalbano mystery, La vampa d'agosto (August Blaze), in which his hero becomes perilously close to his enemies, came out in mid-April and has sold more than 500,000 copies. Yet he has no illusions on the subject of literary fame.
He talks with passionate enthusiasm about Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1957) he describes without hesitation as the "greatest Italian novel of the 20th century". He uses words such as "brave" and "courageous" in regard to Gadda, another late starter who came to writing after a lifetime in engineering. Camilleri acknowledges this audacious experimental novelist as an inspiration. He loves the way in which Gadda employs non-literary Italian in his masterpiece - slang, dialect terms and phrases, even the dry language of academic textbooks. Gadda, like James Joyce, is a translator's nightmare and, as a consequence, the two novels he wrote in old age have not fared well outside Italy. Camilleri reveres him, not least for the sheer joy he took in the act of composition.
Camilleri only became really wealthy in his 70s, remains true to his left-wing principles and is eagerly awaiting the protracted downfall of Silvio Berlusconi, whose control over the Italian media he alludes to scathingly in Il giro di boa (Rounding the Mark, 2003). Camilleri shows interest in very few crime writers, reserving particular praise for his fellow Marxist Dashiell Hammett, whom he considers infinitely superior to Raymond Chandler, whose plots he finds incredible. He is very much aware of the literary legacy he has inherited from other Sicilian novelists. His grandfather knew Luigi Pirandello, and Camilleri recalls meeting him once as a small boy. He respects Pirandello's plays, on which he has worked in the theatre, but it is the writer of short stories who haunts him. (These were translated into English in 1959, and a selection of the best appeared in 1965 - both books are long out of print.)
Another great Sicilian became one of Camilleri's dearest friends. He speaks of Leonardo Sciascia with admiration and affection, an admiration shared by Montalbano, who reads Sciascia's 1963 undoubted masterwork Il consiglio d'Egitto (The Council of Egypt) on one of those rare evenings when he isn't questioning suspects or risking his life with his daring methods of detection. Sciascia's novel is set in 18th-century Palermo and is concerned with a breathtakingly impudent forgery. What starts in comedy ends in horror and melodrama. Its appeal for Camilleri is easy to understand, since his Montalbano mysteries shift effortlessly from the comic to the grotesque.
Camilleri's translator, the American poet Stephen Sartarelli, told me that there is something of Sciascia in the character of Montalbano. Sciascia entered politics in middle age and stood out in the Italian senate as a model of honesty and decency. His speeches were noted for being laconic, the rarest of virtues in a politician in any culture. His lean prose is infused with irony and scepticism, and these Voltairean qualities are evident in Camilleri's narrative technique. Montalbano is honest and decent, and he is happiest when the people he is interrogating cut the crap and speak the truth. There is a melancholy side to his nature, too, never more expressive than when he is confronting the sadness inherent in certain human relationships. The saddest of all to date is dramatised in Il ladro di merendine (The Snack Thief, 1996), in which François, the son of a Tunisian prostitute, Karima, and a French itinerant worker, is caught stealing the lunchboxes of other schoolchildren. Karima, now a single mother, has ended up in Vigàta, where she has found work as a very obliging domestic. Then she disappears and François is left to his own desperate devices. It soon becomes apparent that the hapless little thief is as frightened and unhappy as he is hungry.
Professor Natale Tedesco from the University of Palermo has written an article on the Montalbano books in which he emphasises the words "comic" and "ironic". The novels are indeed funny, and that is one of the reasons why they are so popular. Some of the jokes are esoteric, such as the running gag about the book Judge Lo Bianco has been writing for years: The Life and Exploits of Rinaldo and Antonio Lo Bianco, Masters of Jurisprudence at the University of Girgenti at the Time of King Martin the Younger (1402-1409). That title alone tells the reader all he needs to know of the judge's character. Then there is Catarella, the desk sergeant who answers the switchboard at the police station and mishears almost everything he is told. He speaks his very own brand of sawn-off Sicilian, which Sartarelli clearly enjoys translating. He is like one of those genial half-wits, gabbling away in Cockney, who crop up in Dickens. Yet the wily Camilleri invests this mangler of language and logic with a talent he denies to the intelligent and well-read Montalbano, for Catarella is a genius at the computer, the manifold complications of which are a mystery Montalbano is destined never to solve.
Montalbano has a long-term girlfriend called Livia, who lives and works in Genoa. Whenever the heroic cop is especially lovelorn, Livia is happy to adjust her schedule and hop on the next plane to Palermo to calm and comfort him. She just happens to be in Vigàta when François is captured, and the child brings out all her dormant maternal feelings. He quickly responds to her loving attentiveness, and Montalbano contemplates the possibility of being not only a husband, but a father as well. The scenes in Montalbano's house overlooking the sea, with the detective experiencing jealousy as Livia and François become ever more attached, are written with a tenderness that never degenerates into sentimentality.
Are the Montalbano novels formulaic in essence? Yes, of course they are, but Camilleri's chosen formula allows him the freedom to explore any number of interesting and dissolute byways. Perhaps Montalbano's most endearing characteristic is his passion for good food. He is always dismayed when his second-in-command, Inspector Mimì Augello, sprinkles an excess of Parmesan over a subtly flavoured dish. Augello is a dedicated womaniser, whereas his chief remains faithful to Livia, in spite of the many temptations he has to resist. Women of all ages find Montalbano attractive, none more so than the beautiful Swede, Ingrid Sjostrom, who is married to a wealthy Sicilian and, in the first book in the series, abused by her father-in-law. Ingrid, according to Camilleri, is every Italian man's idea of a blonde bombshell. She has no religious scruples regarding sexual gratification, while her skill at the wheel of a sports car would incur the envy of Michael Schumacher. Whenever Montalbano needs to get from one part of the island to another in double-quick time, Sjostrom is invariably at hand to transport him. Every so often, she spends the night with him in the beach house, but Montalbano can be relied upon to leap from the bed as soon as Sjostrom gets seriously frisky.
The very last Montalbano mystery has already been written. Camilleri, now 81 and a dedicated and defiant chain-smoker, has perhaps his own mortality in mind. In recent years he has published a collection of vituperative articles about Berlusconi and some memoirs of Sicily, and hopes to produce a few more Montalbano novels before the final one is published. Montalbano is in his 50s, still not married to Livia, and deeply conscious that the battle against crime and corruption is unending. His loyal team continues to give him support, as does Nicolò Zito, the news presenter on the Free Channel television network (which isn't owned, it is implied, by Berlusconi, unlike the more conservative Televigàta). Zito is there to answer Montalbano's every query and to give out information that often lures the villains from their hiding places.
The books begin in the age of the lira, but the euro is the accepted currency in the most recent titles. Cellphones are regularly employed. Yet, for all these nods to modernity, the Montalbano mysteries have a timeless feel about them. They are the books of a wise old man who has lived a lot, eaten well and versed himself in the best Italian and foreign literature. Only in Camilleri will you find a sex-crazed young woman discussing the merits of Kafka after Montalbano has removed her hand from his genitals. Montalbano, in melancholy vein, recalls lines by Montale and Ungaretti, and in La gita a Tindari (Excursion to Tindari, 2000), when he is feeling ashamed of being a policeman, he remembers the poem Pasolini wrote in 1968 at the time of the student demonstrations in Rome. The unpredictable Pasolini sides with the police on that occasion, dismissing the privileged students as self-indulgent and bourgeois.
There are sly comments on Italian life and culture in each of the novels, some of which Sartarelli has to explain in the informative notes at the back. Who is Mike Bongiorno, for example? I would describe him as Italian TV's answer to Des O'Connor - cringe-makingly vivacious and suspiciously younger than springtime. The television series Montalbano, which is a big hit in Italy and Australia but yet to be shown in Britain, has of necessity to omit some of the more obviously literary asides, while retaining Camilleri's brilliant dialogue. His knowledge of the theatre has proved invaluable when it comes to writing conversation.
Five of the Montalbano mysteries, all expertly translated by Sartarelli, are available from Picador. They deserve to be read in the sequence they were written: The Shape of Water, The Terracotta Dog, The Snack Thief, The Voice of the Violin and Excursion to Tindari, which has just been published. The Scent of the Night (that "scent", Sartarelli insists, ought to be "smell"), Rounding the Mark and The Patience of the Spider will appear next year. Camilleri has his detractors, but they tend to be the kind of people who rate plot above characterisation and prefer suspense to what one might call human interest. The real Sicily lives in his pages - its smells, its tastes (I have already cooked a couple of the dishes Montalbano enjoys most) and, above all, its language. Sicily, in turn, is proud of him. His birthplace of Porto Empedocle, on which Vigàta is based, has changed its name to Vigàta. I should like to think that this honour pleases him as much, if not more, than his astonishing sales figures.
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