In Montelusa, Sicily, a young woman is found having been shot in the face from close range and her body is abandoned on waste ground. The only identifying feature is a tattoo of a sphinx moth on her shoulder. Inspector Montalbano finds links to three other girls, all rescued from an underworld sex trade, but they have all disappeared as well.
This is the eleventh Montalbano book, translated from the Italian. The last translated book that I reviewed, Water-Blue Eyes, failed to satisfy me, so would this one?
No.
OK, let’s be honest here. I’ve just this minute finished the book and if I don’t write the review now, I think I’ll have forgotten everything about it. I’ll be fair, this isn’t my sort of book, as the mystery element of it is completely incidental to what seems to be the main point of the narrative, mainly Montalbano gazing at his own navel, considering how rubbish life is. The translation seems to be making an attempt to keep the Italian style of writing alive, which works in places, but also involves using some very odd phrases – meteoropathic, for example. I’m sure there’s a single word in Italian that means the same thing, but that’s not an English word. You can replace a word with a phrase if necessary…
I could go on (and on) but I won’t. Looking on Amazon, it seems that most people who read this book liked it. Good for them. But if you’re on the lookout for what is first and foremost a great mystery, avoid this one.
I’ll certainly not be revisiting the series in future. Simply not my thing at all.
In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel 
Thank you for the warning- doesn’t sound like my cuppa tea at all. But what do we foolish mortals know? The only way something can be Real Literature is if it tells you over and over again you’re slowly approaching death and are deathly dull.
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I should have spotted the danger signs when the Guardian declared it a “great detective novel”. Not the same as a “great mystery novel” at all. Still, it’s something I can add to the staffroom book box rather than taking up valuable (and limited) space…
What fascinates me a little is that it’s advertised as a detective novel and Amazon’s average review is 4/5. Which leads me to the theory that either a) I’m missing the point of this book or b) the average viewer doesn’t actual want a mystery that makes them think but would rather read about someone who’s priority seems to be where his next mullet is coming from,.
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Heavens! You don’t want our Real Novelists to go adulterating their style in order to create a *mystery*, do you? It’s true they haven’t got an idea of what a plot is or what constitutes a legitimate clue (or mystery, for that matter), but they’ll give you a nice dose of characterization and you won’t even notice.
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Ha. To be fair, there are a couple of authors who seem to make it onto the shelves with their new releases but can still write a mystery. Christopher Fowler springs to mind… there must be someone else as well…
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Oh, agreed, of course- Bill Pronzini, Peter Lovesey, Christopher Fowler, Paul Halter, practically all of Japan… I’m just pointing out that there’s a very popular school of writing that will do anything in their power to avoid writing an actual mystery. Ever read the Sister Mary Helen books? I have no idea why I did, and the author’s most praised book is one with an overweight woman who wants to screw a salesman she meets one day and murder her mother so she can go to a spa in Colorado. In other news that day, a rapist is going around killing women to get back at his mother for unspecified reasons, and when Mummy finds the gun in the bathroom and other convenient evidence, she can’t imagine their significance. All this is mixed with a police detective’s love life, a cop injured in pursuit of the rapist, and a busybody nun who hides mystery novels in her prayerbooks. Drama! Characterization! Fun for the whole family! And no joy whatsoever before, during, or after reading it.
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Patrick is right, you know. We’re a vulgar, unsophisticated lot for daring to even think that a literary crime novel addressing the decay of the moral fiber and family break down in our communities should be entertaining – or even worse, should harbor something as mechanical and contrived as a clever plot! In what time do we think we’re living, for Poe’s sake, the 1930s?
It’s unfortunate that the novels by M.P.O. Books have trouble finding their way into the English language. His novels are classically constructed, but read like a modern thriller/police procedural – especially the last two books are examples of bridging the gap between the past and present. So naturally, he’s nowhere to be found on today’s bestseller lists. Luckily, he’s with a small publisher who believes in him and also happens to have translated several of Paul Doherty’s books in Dutch.
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As the representative Italian here (or should that be the designated Italian), I thought I would chime in here – Camilleri in Italy is astoundingly popular, though the success is not based on him being a great plotter of mysteries, which he clearly is not. He writes his novels in a Southern Italian dialect which is incredibly evocative but which creates enormous difficulties in translation as you would expect with any kind of idiomatic style of writing. He is also seen as being an important writer for writing about the high levels of corruption in the South of the Italian peninsula, a subject frequently ignored given that Berlusconi and his cronies, who has run the country since 1994 are deeply embedded within high levels of criminality.
Does this matter in terms of enjoying a book and being able to critique it? Not necessarily, but it does provide a different basis for appreciation I would say. Camilleri, who is a prolific author despite being in his 80s (he was 86 last month), and has stuck his neck out to be critical of Berlusconi and to write in a language that many in Italy find hard to understand. There is a lot of comedy in his work and Montalbano is I think a very compelling character in most of the book (you might enjoy the TV version currently on BBC Four Steve) though i have not read ‘Le Ali della Sfinge’ so can;t comment on this particular one. I will say though that Camilleri’s work (he also writes many other types of books) is varied and intelligent – but I have not attempted to read his work in translation, but I can imagine that it would be very hard to replicate the effect easily – so all I can do is shrug and say, unhelpfully, that it’s pretty impressive in the original!
All the best,
Sergio
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It just wasn’t my cup of tea, Sergio – but then anything with a uninteresting plot isn’t. I didn’t find the character compelling, but there was an attempt in the translation to bring across the dialect, in particular in one of the policemen, although it just sounded odd to me. Perhaps if I’d read the earlier books, I would have been more forgiving – but that’s not how books should be written, in my opinion. I’ll pass on looking further with this author, I think.
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Fair enough Steve. Montalbano is one of those characters that in Italy has virtually passed into local folklore and it is very interesting to get an outsider’s perspective (and I say that as someone who has been living in the UK for quite a while). And apologies for my slightly rambling response before … and my grammar! Wow, it really does seem to go out the window sometimes. Probably thinking in Italian and translating into English .. or high old Gallifreyan perhaps!
Sergio
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