From Sicily comes “a Western cosa nostra.” The translator tells us that in Italy, the Mafia is called “this thing of ours,” which in Italian is "la coFrom Sicily comes “a Western cosa nostra.” The translator tells us that in Italy, the Mafia is called “this thing of ours,” which in Italian is "la cosa nostra" or "Western di cose nostre."
This book is one of the author’s few novels that are not part of the Inspector Montalbano detective series. It’s historical fiction based on the true story of the Sacco family. An author’s note tells us that a good friend asked him to look into the friend’s family history and gave him a stack of documents, family letters, transcripts of trials, etc.
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In the late 19th century, an ambitious landless peasant learned the art of grafting pistachio trees. He rose above the impoverished peasantry and was able to buy land. He had five sons, two of whom emigrated for almost a decade to the USA and Argentina and dutifully sent money home before they returned.
The Sacco family dared to defy the mafia, refusing to pay a portion of their income to the local barons. Cue: many Wild West shootout scenes, burning of crops and buildings, chopping of fruit trees and slaughter of animals. The Saccos didn’t give in. They retaliated both through the legal system and by taking matters into their own hands.
It doesn’t surprise us to learn that the political and legal systems were corrupt. Judges and witnesses were easily bought. What does surprise us is that occasionally witnesses told the truth in defiance of the mafia and judges occasionally ruled against the bosses. Kangaroo court verdicts were sometimes overturned on appeal.
We follow the family saga up to the fascist era in the 1920s when Mussolini sent an anti-mafia administrator to rule over the island. Apparently Mussolini took offense at the mafia having more power than he did. Essentially the mafia was the government at that time in much of rural Sicily.
I enjoyed the story but this book is not quite a real novel. It reads like an expanded outline. We are given many dates and locations and explanations of events that happened. There is little dialog. Occasionally we are told: “Let’s have Alfonso tell us first hand” – followed by what we know is a summary of a court transcript. Of course, as the author told us, he wrote this from a stack of documents as a favor to a friend. And it is a fascinating story.
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Top photo of modern-day Raffadali where the Sacco family had their land. The town still has an annual pistachio festival! The town is located about ten miles inland near the center of Sicily’s southwestern coast.
A social satire, farce and absurdist novel by an Italian author. Margherita, a somewhat medically fragile 14-year-old girl watches her world get overtA social satire, farce and absurdist novel by an Italian author. Margherita, a somewhat medically fragile 14-year-old girl watches her world get overturned by new neighbors. Her best friend is the imaginary, Dust Girl but she wanders the town meeting with many strange characters including ‘Gypsies’ (Roma).
They live in a relatively rural area outside the city when new neighbors come in, buy a vacant lot next door, and build an ultra-modern cubic house covered in black mirrored glass. It has beautiful plastic grass and plastic flowers.
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Margherita’s house is a dumpy place with sheds. Their dog is a mongrel while the new neighbors have a high-strung expensive breed. That's just the start. Little by little her family's friendship with these new neighbors changes their world.
Margherita’s mother stops cooking and spends all her time watching soap operas. Her father, who never cared about his appearance, is suddenly getting hair transplants. Her father also gets involved in the neighbor’s mysterious and undoubtedly illegal ‘import-export’ business. Her older brother falls hard for the beautiful daughter next door and even changes the soccer team he follows.
The influence of the new neighbors is felt across the town. More black cubic houses are built and ‘kids from cubic houses’ show up at school.
Margherita likes to write poems and we read a couple of dozen, many of them setting the tone for each chapter. Here’s one:
Destiny cuts the cake of love, Three slices to some, to others, a crumb.
“You can be fourteen and a half and have regrets, you know. You think I'm too young to have regrets? What if I die when I'm fifteen?
I liked the humor:
One of her mother's specialties is Remembrance of Things Past Meatloaf. “She recycles everything imaginable in it: yesterday's scallopini, the ham from my school lunch, chicken feet and cheese rinds.”
“I was wearing the black outfit that everybody says makes me look two pounds lighter, (so I really need to wear eight of them, one over the other).”
We get straight-forward writing with humor and sarcasm from a girl who knows things way beyond her years. An enjoyable book, perhaps a bit on the ‘cute’ side.
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The author, Stefano Benni, (b. 1947), has written a dozen novels and anthologies of short stories. He is well known in Italy where he has sold more than 2 million books, but he’s relatively unknown to English readers as only three of his books have been translated into English.
Vacation home in Italy near Lake Como from esperiri.com The author from Wikipedia ...more
This is a fictionalized biography of Alexander Alexhine, a Russian chess Grand Master, holder of the world championship chess title from 1927 to 1935 This is a fictionalized biography of Alexander Alexhine, a Russian chess Grand Master, holder of the world championship chess title from 1927 to 1935 and again in 1937. In this review I will give a basic summary of his life, which is largely the plot of the novel, so I should say SPOILERS FOLLOW. (And not all factual details about the main character are from the book itself.)
While Alexhine was born in Russia (1892-1946) he lived at various times in many European countries and ran into political troubles in most. He had made anti-Bolshevik remarks as a young man in Russia, was imprisoned and even sentenced to death but higher powers, recognizing his chess abilities, intervened.
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Obviously, with a life obsessed by chess, was he the classic ‘crazy genius’? He certainly had his share of quirks. Apparently he ‘dined’ by eating chunks of raw meat using his fingers. He usually wore a heavy, full-length black overcoat even in summer. He married four times, almost always to older wealthy women so we suspect not all these relationships were based on love.
When war broke out between Germany and Russia, Alexhine was living in Germany, now subject to harassment for being Russian. He was imprisoned again, apparently for the crime of being a Russian who beat a German at chess. He fled to France and later Portugal.
He moved to Paris and initially found a good refuge. As a world champion he hung out in cafes with celebrities including Jack London, Ian Fleming, Rudyard Kipling, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. (Who knew the latter two were chess enthusiasts?)
One of his wives was half Jewish, living in France at the time of the Nazi occupation. Alexhine claimed that to protect his wife, he was forced to write an analysis of great Jewish chess players. (Alexhine himself was not Jewish.) He did so but he said the Nazi propagandists took his ‘scientific’ work and turned it into an antisemitic screed about how Jews played unfairly and used sneaky moves, etc.
While Alexhine reminisces about all these events, most of the current story takes place in Estoril, Portugal where he was living near his end of life. The story becomes, in part, what I will call a ‘hotel story’ akin to Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.
Alexhine is in an unusual situation. Someone, he doesn't know who, pays his hotel bill for him but he has to write letters to acquaintances begging for money to cover his necessary expenses: alcohol and cigars. He is in the resort hotel off-season and he’s the only guest. His strangeness generates a lot of notice among the staff.
When some guests arrive, he makes friends with a Jewish man. He asks himself ‘Have I ever had a Jewish friend’? As he meditates on that, his mind ratchets up to the next level and he asks himself “Have I ever had a friend’?
The story turns ominous. (view spoiler)[ His doctor tells him he has a year to live; two years if he gives up drinking and cigars. What are the chances of that happening? Had he really been receiving threatening letters? If so, from who? Jews resentful of his collaboration with the Nazis? Was his death from choking on meat really not accidental? (hide spoiler)]
This passage illustrates the author’s style as well as providing us with a main theme of the book:
“Indeed, collaborators...” Correira murmured, looking him straight in the eye. “Those are the worst of all. Though we can think of the Nazis as automatons, stripped of their souls, and therefore unable to act any differently, informers, on the other hand, must have retained a speck of human conscience. It was their choice, therefore, to side with evil, many driven by personal hatred, by envy, by a desire for profit. Moreover, they were able to operate in the shadows, in anonymity. As a result, they were guilty of inexcusable acts. Yet, despite everything, many will never be punished - they will return to their habitual, respectable lives without being made to pay the price for their sins.”
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It's a good story with straightforward writing. The Italian author (1943-2021) was a late-blooming novelist who published his first book at age 50. That book, The Lunenburg Variation, is still the one he is most famous for. His second book is one I have reviewed, Canone inverso. Although a late bloomer, he caught up quickly writing a dozen novels, about half of which have been translated into English.
Top photo of Alexander Alexhine from britannica.com The author from huffingtonpost.it
A mother-daughter story. The short blurb above gives a good summary so I will repeat that here:
The sensitive and powerful story of the love between a A mother-daughter story. The short blurb above gives a good summary so I will repeat that here:
The sensitive and powerful story of the love between a mother and her daughter, a love “gone wrong from the start”. When Esperia exhibits the symptoms of dementia, her daughter takes care of her and help her to rebuild her disintegrating identity. Day after day we learn about the characters of the extended family, the small village still without running water or electricity, in a “bright and harsh” Abruzzo region of Italy. (See geography note below.)
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A lot of the story is told as a monologue of the female main character talking to her elderly mother who lives with her in her illness. They had a strained, and at times, estranged, relationship. Her mother has dementia so she tells her mother her own life story back to her. Her mother had a harsh rural life in a backland environment.
A few quotes illustrate the good writing and tell us about that relationship:
“I was still planning to settle my score with her when she escaped from me into her illness.”
“Her absence is all that's left of her.”
“When she dies, I’ll sink into the guilt I am accruing day by day. It’ll be waiting for me at her funeral.”
“Now I can tell her everything about us, without mercy. She’d forget later. It would be but a fleeting wound. I fantasize about it, but I can't find the courage to be so cowardly.”
“I'm not graceful, nor light-hearted. I'm tethered to the ground, teeth grinding on the links of my chain. My mother, that's what I've labeled every limit. I have charged her with the imperfection of my flight. She's been my excuse. She's the cause, and the reason.”
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The author (b. 1962) has written a half-dozen novels, many of which have won or been nominated for Italy’s major literary prizes. I enjoyed one other book of hers A Girl Returned and I prefer it to this one.
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Geography note: The Abruzzo is a mountainous rural region of Italy that starts only 50 miles east of Rome. Despite that closeness, historically, the area has been a different world, Appalachia-like in its isolation and poverty. Now the abandoned farmland has become parkland and the region is considered one of the ‘greenest’ regions in the EU. Tourism thrives on the sandy beaches along the east coast on the Adriatic Sea.
Top photo of the village of Scanno in the Abruzzo from italiasweetitalia.com The author from europaeditions.com Map from wikimedia ...more
The story begins with two crazy people, an elderly brother and sister, shooting into the street from their balcony using antique rifles. After they arThe story begins with two crazy people, an elderly brother and sister, shooting into the street from their balcony using antique rifles. After they are taken into custody, a search of the apartment reveals some bizarre stuff going on. A sex doll. A room full of giant crucifixes that looks like a setting for witchcraft.
A theme running through the book is that the inspector is worried that he is losing his edge. He's now 57. He’s worried that his age is making him overly cautious. (I liked this quote “We’re born arsonists and we die firemen.”) There's an instance where he has to climb up a ladder. He experiences vertigo and freezes. He's terrified by the crucifixes.
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A second inflatable doll appears in a dumpster. It's identical in all its markings to the one from the crime scene. Someone made it look identical based on photos that appeared in newspapers. Who would go through all that trouble and why?
The inspector realizes he is being taunted by a prankster. The riddles start coming by mail and by messages left in bars. A mysterious map appears.
There's a lot of humor in this book but it tends to be sitcom stuff; jokes about the sex dolls. An unsolicited prostitute comes to the inspector’s house. (view spoiler)[ Sent by his maid’s son who heard from his mother that Montalbano had a sex doll stored in his house. (hide spoiler)]
Lydia, the Inspector’s significant other who lives in a distant city, tends to be just a phone voice in this story. She has a bright young nephew who wants to be a police detective, so Montalbano takes him under his wing and he assists him in the case.
It's not until the middle of the book that we actually get a serious crime to investigate. A young woman is missing. Kidnapped? Murdered? A runaway? No ransom note arrives. The story takes on an ominous tone.
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The author died in 2019 at age 94. He was best known for this Inspector Montalbano series, I think twenty-six in all, although some of the most recent ones do not yet appear to have been translated into English. I enjoy them and I have read and reviewed 10 in the series.
The stories were made into a popular TV series in Italy. Camilleri's hometown, featured under a fictitious name in his novels (Vigàta), has officially appended that name to attract tourists: Porto Empedocle Vigàta, Sicily.
Top photo of Porto Empedocle Vigàta from tripadvisor.com The author from theguardian.com...more
I've read ten Inspector Montalbano books by Camilleri and I’ll start by saying two things about this one. I can’t describe why, but it struck me that I've read ten Inspector Montalbano books by Camilleri and I’ll start by saying two things about this one. I can’t describe why, but it struck me that this volume has some of the author’s best writing.
Secondly, were introduced to an almost new main character: the ‘Evil’ Inspector Montalbano. I'll put why I say that in a spoiler: (view spoiler)[ Inspector Montalbano drives drunk and at high speed on a back road. We are told that two vehicles had to swerve out of his way to avoid a head-on collision. The instructor vandalizes a house under construction because they chopped down his favorite majestic olive tree that is a highlight on his drive to work. He smashes all the windows and spray paints graffiti on the inside and outside of the building. And, not drunk, he gropes a barely 20-ish young woman in his car and she has to jump out to fend off his advances. (hide spoiler)] There’s also a bit more sex and obscenity than in the usual Camilerri.
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The case involves the disappearance of a smooth-talking financial magician who has taken the money of retirees in the local town and disappeared, along with his male assistant. His female assistant sits in the empty office day after day knowing he will come back. But there’s a double twist here. (view spoiler)[ His female assistant is in love with him, but so is his male assistant – the financial wizard is gay. (hide spoiler)]
We are treated to an unusual ending where Montalbano solves the crime almost by ESP. He ‘channels’ a short story by a famous author. I’ll put that in a spoiler too in case you know the story. (view spoiler)[ A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. (hide spoiler)]
There's a sub-story about the inspector having over the years a personal interest in a young boy who is the son of a former Tunisian prostitute involved in a police case. He even has a good friend handling the boy’s financial inheritance. Montalbano's hated superior gets wind of this and senses impropriety. Is the inspector’s relationship to the boy really what we think it might be?
Of course we have all the usual themes that make the Montalbano books so popular. His on-again off-again long-distance relationship with his woman friend Livia. They seem happiest when they are yelling over the phone and hanging up on each other. We see his usual frustration with his quirky staff who are at best quasi-competent at their jobs. Montalbano’s maid/cook reliably comes through with delicious meals for him in the refrigerator but she and her needy family members always end up complicating his life in unexpected ways.
And there's always food. In this book we learn about tumazzo goat cheese, pirciati (a spicy pasta) and other dishes.
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The author died in 2019 at age 94. He was best known for this Inspector Montalbano series, I think twenty-six in all, although some of the most recent ones do not yet appear to have been translated into English. I enjoy them and I have read and reviewed 10 in the series.
The stories were made into a popular TV series in Italy. His hometown, featured under a fictitious name in his novels (Vigàta), has officially appended that name to attract tourists: Porto Empedocle Vigàta, Sicily.
Top photo of a market in Sicily from peregrineadventures.com The author from cnn.com ...more
I’m not a fan of science fiction so I’m still kind of puzzled at why I tried this book because it’s exactly what the blubs say it is. Calvino delves iI’m not a fan of science fiction so I’m still kind of puzzled at why I tried this book because it’s exactly what the blubs say it is. Calvino delves into the origins of the universe and all the stages of its evolution. We have 34 stories, about 10 pages each, with titles such as Crystals, Mitosis, The Meteorites, Solar Storm, Shells and Time, and Implosion.
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The author adds human interest by interconnecting the stories with characters throughout the book. These folks start out as two-dimensional slime characters with names like Qfwfq, Xlthlx and Mrs Vhd Vhd. There’s humor, as in comments about how crowded they all were when the universe was initially an infinitely tiny point.
I appreciated the three stories I read but looking ahead to 400 pages of this I didn’t finish it. I’ll give you an idea from those few stories and maybe you’ll want to read it. So SPOILERS FOLLOW on those.
In At Daybreak, Qfwfq remembers when ‘things occurred.’ Previously there weren’t any ‘things.’ Everything was two-dimensional and nothing could be separated. There was no up or down because gravity didn’t matter – it didn’t exist.
In the story The Distance of the Moon we have human characters in boats who row out into the ocean, mount ladders from the boats, and climb to the moon to mine its ‘milk.’ As they climb up the ladder, the moon’s attraction pulls them toward the moon and when they climb back down, the earth's attraction pulls them back head-first into the water. They can reach the moon only once a month when it is closest. There's a romance where the boat captain's wife follows a deaf cousin of the narrator onto the moon. Will they get stranded for a month together on the moon?
In Games Without End kids play marbles with hydrogen atoms and the nasty kid is storing up marbles to make his own universe.
I actually found the stories intriguing; I just wasn’t up for 400 pages of them.
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This book, titled the ‘Complete’ Cosmicomics, is a collection of all of these short science fictions published by Calvino and it includes the original collection called simply ‘Cosmicomics’ as well as those published in collections called ‘t zero’ and ‘Numbers in the Dark.’
Top photo from exoplanets.nasa.gov The author from theguardian.com...more
An autobiography/memoir by an Italian author. I’ll call her Marina and I’ll start with the book’s title which I think is a misnomer. Marina’s father wAn autobiography/memoir by an Italian author. I’ll call her Marina and I’ll start with the book’s title which I think is a misnomer. Marina’s father wasn't all that distant. Sure, he was a busy man yet Marina relates several instances where her father showed his love, took her to various places and did things like teaching her Yiddish words while he was shaving. As we will see, if anyone was ‘distant,’ it was her mother. “Absent from my life in different ways, father and mother, symbolic ghosts... my mother with her inability to accept me, my father with his tragic death.”
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I should say the following contains spoilers. (As does the Introduction which gives a summary of the book.) When she was ten her parents divorced, and she and her sister were sent to live with her mother’s parents in Italy. Two years later her father was arrested and died in a concentration camp. Marina feels guilty as if it had been her responsibility to get to know him better before he died.
There are two themes that permeate the book. The first is of a young girl who comes of age in such a polyglot, multi-cultural world that she is uncertain what her homeland is, what her ethnic-cultural background is, and what her religion is. Maybe the answer is simply that she doesn't have a homeland or a language because there are just too many.
Marina was born in Latvia and learned Latvian from maids and nannies. Her Russian Jewish father and Italian mother spoke German to each other. Her schooling was also in German. In school she studied Latin. Her father taught her Yiddish words. Then at age ten she moved to Italy to live with her mother's parents who spoke French while her mother stayed in Latvia for her job as a professor. Of course, now living in Italy, the young girl eventually learned Italian even though her grandparents spoke French.
Her grandparents were members of the Waldensian Christian sect, in an area west of Turin in northern Italy, just ten miles or so from the French border. They are largely anti-Catholic (as is her mother) yet living in a Catholic country. (One could say 'understandably anti-Catholic.' The Waldensians lost half their population to Catholic persecution in 1550 and again a hundred years later.) This group’s opposition to the Catholic Church pre-dates Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
So what nationality is Marina now? Is Italy her new ‘homeland’?
If anything, this book should be titled Distant Mother. Not three pages go by where there isn’t mention, sometimes a rant or a screed, or a passage with a sense of melancholy and sadness about her mother's feelings toward her. Her mother was a well-educated woman, a professor, who very much favored her younger sister. Her one-year-younger sister was talented in singing and dancing and playacting whereas ‘all Marina could do was read.’ Her sister was ‘inventive’ but Marina was a liar.
Her mother was always busy, so the girls grew up with nannies and tutors. After her parents’ divorce, and later, her father's death, her mother stayed in Latvia for a time and then moved to Italy to live near her daughters but she had her own apartment and ‘visited’ her daughters at their grandparents' home every evening.
Marina’s mother is so often absent that Marina comes to love the much-longed-for letters from her mother in her handwriting, almost more than she loves her mother herself. Even as a young woman in her twenties, she is devastated one day (view spoiler)[ when she sees an unfinished letter to relatives lying on her mother's desk. Marina is heartbroken to read in that sacred handwriting effusive praise for her sister’s latest escapades and a couple of dull factual lines about Marina. (hide spoiler)]
When Marina’s now elderly mother comes to live with her, Marina is a proper, attentive, and caring daughter but (view spoiler)[ In a terribly sad but fascinating turnabout, just as her mother had been only a ‘dutiful’ mother to Marina, Marina realizes she no longer loves her mother. In a kind of ‘now we’re even’ way, she recognizes ‘You never loved me and now I understand because I don’t love you either.’ Of course, all this is unspoken. (hide spoiler)]
Marina arrived in Italy concurrently with the start of fascism and the rise of Mussolini. So she was in an interesting situation where, as she tells us, she couldn't tell what was normal, traditional Italian culture, and what started with fascism and the war. Were there always these military parades and political speeches in the park? Did Italian kids always have to stand and give the Nazi salute to greet their professor in the morning? On an ominous note, when she started attending classes in Italy, she had to file a ‘certificate of mixed race’ with the school system, in reference to her Jewish father. Neither she nor her family thought anything of this at the time – just silly paperwork.
We learn of some of Marina’s war adventures. She hides in bomb shelters when air raids sirens sound. Her school has been destroyed by bombs and now she fears having to take a train to classes at a new location because the train is constantly being bombed. (view spoiler)[ Somehow Marina gets involved with helping a neighbor boy bury in his backyard a wheelbarrow full of weapons stolen from an armory. (hide spoiler)]
I'm of mixed opinion about reading first the introduction at the front of the book. On one hand, the reader should be aware that it gives a summary of all the major events of her life and therefore is a summary of the book. It's a memoir or even an autobiography, so there’s not really a ‘plot’ in the traditional sense. On the other hand, given how much the writing jumps around in time and tense in the first two-thirds of the book, knowing that timeline in advance is helpful in following the trajectory of Marina’s story.
So I can't finish without saying this, which I consider a weakness of the book. The introduction talks about the innovative style of much of the book, which is certainly true of the first two-thirds of the text that jumps around from past to present and changes tense from past to present to future. But then the last third of the book becomes a very well-organized, traditional autobiography of her life after age 20. In this part of the book the author switches to a straightforward chronological style, talking of her marriage, having four children by age 30 (of whom we read almost nothing), difficulties with her husband, and her career as a teacher and writer.
We can say the style is ‘innovative,’ but it gave me more of an appearance that it was disorganized or thrown together from separate parts. In fact I looked to see if this was published after her death (it wasn’t) because I started to think that editors compiled it from bits and pieces of her posthumous papers. That’s not the case, so this is how the author intended the book to be structured. It’s a ‘mother-daughter relationship book’ but that theme gets a bit repetitive when it is brought up every few pages. I gave it a ‘4’ for the story, but a ‘3’ overall for the writing and organization.
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The author (1925-2016) wrote a dozen novels in Italian but this one appears to be the only one translated into English. She was a French teacher in Italy for 25 years.
Top photo: The town of Torre Pellice where the author lived which shows the world headquarters of the Waldensian Church from wikimapia.org The author with one of her children in 1951 from primolevicenter.org
I have enjoyed some other works by this author, such as The Late Mattia Pascal, but this was a DNF for me. I got about a third of the way through, so I have enjoyed some other works by this author, such as The Late Mattia Pascal, but this was a DNF for me. I got about a third of the way through, so I gave it a good shot.
In all of the other works I’ve read by this author, the main character is an anti-hero, stumbling through life, always doing and saying the wrong thing, then trying to make amends, and getting himself in deeper. This book has the usual humor and sarcasm but it’s basically philosophical ramblings as we watch the main character’s descent into madness. Otherwise there’s no plot.
“Wives are made for discovering a husband’s faults.”
His father died before he gave him a grandson “who would be not at all like me.”
He wants to be alone “without myself, and with a stranger at hand.”
There’s a lot of looking in the mirror. Who is it? Is it me? A stranger? What if we never were able to see a reflection of our selves?
You’re not the same person you were a minute ago. (Thus the one hundred thousand of the title.)
“Does a cloud by any chance know anything of the fact of being?...But to explain the wherefore of the why?”
I gave up. Maybe it’s just me because the book is highly rated on GR – about a 4.1 and many of my GR friends rated it highly. I didn’t give a rating because I did not finish it.
I also note some confusion in the title given this translated book – it is listed as both ‘One, None’ and ‘One, No One.’
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The Italian author (1867-1936) won the Nobel Prize in 1934. Photo from news.18.com...more
The book title is truth in advertising: most of the story is about cocaine addicts in Paris in the early 1900s. The main character is a man from ItalyThe book title is truth in advertising: most of the story is about cocaine addicts in Paris in the early 1900s. The main character is a man from Italy who gets a job as a journalist, sometimes making up stories from this world of addicts. He's a womanizer, so much so that when he is with his current woman he goes over his mental list of “who’s next.” He’s a misogynist of course and a major theme is jealousy.
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The story is loaded with humor, black humor, sarcasm and cynicism as you can tell from many of the quotes below. At times we get his philosophy of life in streams of drug-infused consciousness.
None of his cocaine-fueled mistresses are skid-row types. A lot of the story takes place in the mansion of a wealthy Armenian woman who hosts Gatsby-type parties serving champagne with powdered additives. She brags that she sleeps in, and has sex in, her future coffin.
As an investigative reporter, he has to sample the stuff himself. He becomes an addict, although not to the point of desperation where his life revolves around his addiction. The story also follows three of his mistresses who are addicts in varying degrees of dependency, including his true love, a woman he calls ‘Cocaine.’ She’s a singer and dancer, famous for her male impersonation act. Some of the characters are also addicted to morphine.
Here's a sample of quotes so you know what you are in for if you read it:
A young woman’s father thinks: “He knew that when girls start by being five minutes late they end by being a fortnight late, and even more. All sexual morality is basically intended to avert the danger of girls being late. ”
[of many journalists:] “…they’re superficial types with nothing in their heads but a short list of books they haven’t read…”
“A man tells you the most interesting things he knows during the first half hour he talks to you; after that he either repeats himself or offers you variations on the same theme.”
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“He was 40, which is the most frightening age in life. You don't feel sorry for the old, because they're old already; you don't feel sorry for the dead, because they're dead already. But you do feel sorry for those approaching old age, those approaching death.”
“Some stuffed dogs are perfect imitations of live dogs, but Maud’s was a perfect imitation of a stuffed one…”
“Money in small quantities soils the hands, but in large quantities it cleans them…”
“It doesn't surprise me when a man steals. What surprises me is when he doesn't. Because there’s a latent, potential thief in everyone, and I make no distinction between those who have stolen and those who haven't stolen yet.”
It’s amazing how ‘modern’ the story feels even though it was set 100 years ago. For example, the male impersonator act of his woman friend. The author mentions in passing a guy named Ricard Duncan, living a kind of hippie life. This intrigued me and I wondered if Duncan was a real person – and yes he was. So a little digression on this fellow follows. I’ll nominate him as the ‘First Hippie’ long before the flower children of San Francisco.
Duncan was a brother of the famous dancer Isadora Duncan. (We all know the story of how she died when her famous flowing scarf got caught in the wheels of a car.) He created dance routines for his sister and he was a playwright, theater manager, printer, clothes designer and weaver. He was a hanger-on of Gertrude Stein and ran a kind of commune theater group in Paris, believing in making your own clothing from your own sheep, etc.
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Pitigrilli, the author, was a pseudonym for Dino Segre, an Italian author (1893-1975). He published a dozen novels but it appears that only two, Cocaine and The Man Who Searched for Love, have been published in English.
[Revised 10/27/23]
Top photo of Paris in the 1920s from insider.com Richard Duncan and family in everyday dress from cnch.org The author from alchetron.com...more
A fun ‘who-done-it’ with a lot of humor from an Italian author.
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The main character is an investigative journali[Revised, spoiler hidden 8/11/22]
A fun ‘who-done-it’ with a lot of humor from an Italian author.
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The main character is an investigative journalist when he discovers the first body in the spa of the country club. It’s a person he knew and when the police ask him about what confidential things the victim might have told him he says “I wanted to joke that I'm a reporter by trade and therefore the least likely person someone would confide in, unless they want to hear about it on the evening news.”
The body count in this crime thriller is five. By page 35 we have two bodies in separate murders and an attempt on the main character’s life. (view spoiler)[ He is wounded in a shooting. A few pages later he is again attacked and hospitalized, so we have a lot of jokes about ambulances, hospitals and camaraderie with the EMTs that he is now on a first-name basis with. (hide spoiler)]
He’s assigned a huge guy as a bodyguard so we get a lot of humor from that. Then a connection to the murders develops in the Dominican Republic. His newspaper assigns him to cover the story since he’s personally involved in it. He and he and his bodyguard fly there. More humor.
Our main character is 40-ish and divorced, but he’s interested in the female district attorney he deals with many times in the story. She may be interested in him, but she tells him repeatedly they can’t get involved while he’s first a suspect and later a possible victim in an active murder investigation. Do you think he listens to her?
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We get a bit of local color of the setting in the wealthy suburbs of Padua in northern Italy. But the country club nestled among 3,000 square-foot homes is a lot like an American country club setting. The area is called the Euganean Hills (see top photo). There’s enough about the sport of golfing and the culture of golfing and country clubs that I created a “golf” shelf for this book.
The strength of this novel is its humor and its one-liners, so some examples:
“Officer Buoni drove an old VW Polo with windows so fogged up it was like climbing into a glass of milk.”
“If you knew my wife, you'd be glad you don't have any relatives.”
[she was] "...as pleasant as a famine in Africa.”
“…with her sad-sack attitude, Francesca could depress a lottery winner.”
When the police investigate the crime scene, "…they will find more fingerprints than in the Milan subway.”
“Julio took me to a bar so full of thugs it made Alcatraz look like a convent.”
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The Italian author had a career in banking and finance and enjoyed reading detective novels. At age 59 he became a self-publishing ‘star’ because he self-published his books through Amazon and his six novels have sold more than 100,000 copies. This book appears to be his only one translated into English.
Top photo of the Euganean Hills from theguardian.uk.co Miglianico Country Club near Pescara in central Italy from playgolfontour.com The author from aboutamazon.eu...more
I had never read a novel set in Sardinia. When I saw this book I assumed it was by an obscure Sardinian author. Imagine my surprise when I read the blI had never read a novel set in Sardinia. When I saw this book I assumed it was by an obscure Sardinian author. Imagine my surprise when I read the blurbs and saw that she was the 1928 Nobel Prize winner in literature! That led me to wonder how many female Nobel Prize winners in literature are out there I had not heard of. (I made a list, at end.)
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Sardinia is an island province of Italy, just south of Corsica which is part of France. (see map). The topography of the island, its rural nature, and its poverty are a lot like Sicily. The story was published in 1913. While the presence of a few autos in the local city are mentioned, it really has the flavor of the author’s childhood in the late 1800’s.
Some spoilers follow:
The first few pages outline the setup of the story for us. We have a declining noble family in a decaying mansion. That theme is a genre in itself! I think of The Leopard by Lampedusa The Leopard, On Heroes and Tombs by Argentina’s Ernesto Sabato On Heroes and Tombs, Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote Other Voices, Other Rooms. We also learn a lot about the superstitions of the local peasants, such as Giobiana, a witch, who appears to local women if they spin yarn on Thursday evenings! There’s a lot of local color of the landscape and of rural peasant customs.
There are three sisters, the Pintors, who were essentially terrorized by their now-deceased father. They could not leave the house while he waited to select suitable husbands for them. (view spoiler)[ They never arrived. (hide spoiler)] The youngest sister managed to run off with a lover and the father searched for her until he died under mysterious circumstances.
The two older sisters never answered the runaway sister’s letters but they stayed in touch with her son, their nephew, who comes to figure prominently in the story. The sisters remain relatively isolated in their decaying house - pieces of it fall into the street in several scenes. Although they are at times on the border of starvation, they maintain their ‘nobility’ by maintaining their distance from the common people. Their only social activities are occasionally going to church and to church festivals.
The narrator of the story is Efix, an old man who single-handedly farms and runs what remains of the estate. Over the years most of the land was sold off or lost in lawsuits. There’s no money. He is dedicated to serving them and lives his life vicariously through the sisters, dreaming of the restoration of their nobility. He was secretly in love with the sister who ran off and he’s a little bit in love with the youngest remaining sister (now 30-ish). They ‘pay’ him with IOUs and even talk about him inheriting the estate when they die. (Fat chance – he’s considerably older than all of them!)
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Efix is very religious. Religion – sin, guilt, forgiveness, penance - become major themes even though the sisters are pretty nonchalant about religion. They go to church for show and to the church festivals for entertainment. Efix has secrets. (view spoiler)[ He knows the mysteries about the youngest sister’s escape and the death of the father and he’s not talking. (hide spoiler)]
The runaway sister dies and the nephew they have never met appears and turns their world upside down. He’s good-looking and spends money lavishly at the local festa. Every young woman is after him. But things are not what they seem.
The sisters get further in debt. There’s an old woman in town known as ‘the usurer’ who gets her hooks into them. The rich widower in town – actually a cousin of theirs - wants to take over their estate. (view spoiler)[ He’s secretly in love with the youngest sister. Will he essentially force her into marrying him so the sisters don’t end up as beggars on the street? (hide spoiler)]
The theme of decline goes beyond the decaying house and the sisters’ fall from nobility. The sisters lament that ‘even gentlemen are merchants now.’ There’s nothing to do in the town. There are abandoned houses in ruins. Malaria is endemic. People live in the past when times were better. “She lived so much in the past that the present hardly interested her.” The phrase ‘memory sickness’ is used. By the way, this is the condition of a lot of these isolated rural towns today in Italy and in much of southern Europe. Abandoned villages where only a few elderly folks remain.
Here's a sample of the author’s nicely descriptive writing about a church festival:
“She seems to be a girl again, on the priest’s belvedere on a May evening. A great copper moon rises from the sea and the whole world seems made of gold and pearl. An accordion fills the air with plaintive cries. The courtyard is illuminated by a fire’s rosy gleam that makes the slender figure of the dark musician and the purplish faces of the women and children dancing the ballo sardo stand out against the gray wall. Their shadows move like phantoms on the trampled grass and along the church walls; gold buttons, silvery braids of costumes, accordion keys flash and gleam. Everything else is lost in the pearly shadows of moonlight. Noemi remembered never taking part directly in the feast, while her older sisters laughed and enjoyed themselves, and Lia couched like a here in a grassy corner of the courtyard, perhaps thinking of escape even then.”
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The author (1871-1936) grew up in this area of Sardinia that she wrote about. Her family discouraged her writing because, Wikipedia tells us, nice girls didn’t write novels for the world to read and ridicule them. She was a prolific writer with dozens of novels and stories although very few appear to have been translated into English.
Here's a list of female Nobel Prize recipients. Of the 120 recipients of the Nobel award in literature by 2023, only 17 are women. I thought it would be an interesting project for someone to read one work by each. Several are poets.
Women who won the Nobel Prize in Literature: 2022 - Annie Ernaux (France) 2020 - Louise Gluck (United States) 2019 - Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) 2015 - Svetlana Alexeivich (Belarus) ... 2013 - Alice Munro (Canada) ... 2009 - Herta Mueller (Germany) ... 2007 - Doris Lessing (Britain) ... 2004 - Elfriede Jelinek (Austria) ... 1996 - Wislawa Szymborska (Poland) ... 1993 - Toni Morrison (United States) 1991 - Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) 1966 - Nelly Sachs (Germany, Sweden) 1945 - Gabriela Mistral (Chile) 1938 - Pearl S. Buck (United States) 1928 - Sigrid Undset (Norway) 1926 - Grazia Deledda (Italy) 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf (Sweden)
Map from researchgate.net The town of Galtelli in northeast Sardinia, where the story is set from deliciousitaly.com Sketches of the author from sicilyinsideandout.com
[Edited for typos, spoilers 3/25/22, 11/17/23]...more
My ninth Inspector Montalbano mystery. These are police procedurals translated from the Italian.
It’s a fun read as the Inspector is known for his lovMy ninth Inspector Montalbano mystery. These are police procedurals translated from the Italian.
It’s a fun read as the Inspector is known for his love of good food both at a local (Sicilian) trattoria and that cooked for him by his maid/cook. His excessive hours and his obsession with his cases tries the patience of his woman friend, so the relationship in on again/off again. The Inspector is aging and he worries about how that is affecting his hearing and vision.
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This is a full-Mafia story. A man has been shot and his body found in a concrete tunnel in a sea of mud at a construction site. Little by little the investigation leads to a world of public construction contracts as slimy as the mud. The murdered man had a pretty German wife who, shall we say, is running a home business on the side while her husband is at work.
There’s a mysterious occupant in the house – her 'uncle' from Germany who only speaks Italian, and a vast secret room under the garage. There’s a possible kidnapping, a car on fire, threats against the family of a journalist, drugs planted in a baby stroller, and other dirty doings.
A good story with a lot of local color of Sicily. And you have to love the mouth-watering food scattered throughout the book: purpiteddri a strascinasale (boiled octopus) and a sartu (rice cooked in a mold around a meat and vegetable filling) and fine local wines. (There are websites featuring recipes from Camilleri’s books.) Some of the Inspector’s underlings speak a dialect that sounds almost like a Sicilian Brooklyn accent that can get annoying at times.
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The author died in 2019 at age 94. He was best known for this Inspector Montalbano series, I think twenty-six in all, although some of the most recent ones do not yet appear to have been translated into English. The stories were made into a popular TV series in Italy. His hometown, featured under a fictitious name in his novels, has officially appended that name to attract tourists: Porto Empedocle Vigàta, Sicily.
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Top photo Porto Empedocle Vigàta, Sicily from tripadvisor.com Purpu a strascinasale from lapasticciona.it The Camilerri statue in Porto Empedocle Vigàta from trs98.it...more
We follow the life of a 30-ish single man in Rome. He’s ambitionless and lost, fighting to stop himself from becoming a total alcoholic. He’s bad enouWe follow the life of a 30-ish single man in Rome. He’s ambitionless and lost, fighting to stop himself from becoming a total alcoholic. He’s bad enough as it is. He has no career but sometimes does editing work for a sports magazine. Most of his friends are adrift in the same boat. I’ll let him speak first:
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“Personally, I would happily have stayed out of the race. I'd known all kinds of people, some who'd reach the finishing post and others who hadn't even gotten off the starting block, and sooner or later they all ended up equally dissatisfied, which is why I’d come to the conclusion that it was better to stay on the sidelines and just observe life. But I hadn't reckoned with being desperately short of money one day at the beginning of spring last year. All the rest followed naturally, as these things do.”
The main character has women, mostly one-night stands. He seems to enjoy even more the morning after, when the woman has left for work, and he can have coffee already made for him, and shower with clean towels.
Now two passages from the introduction:
“[The author’s] characters, unless gainfully employed or blinkered by upward mobility, sit on the brink of despair, condemned, as each is, to a staring contest with the abyss, sensing all along that the abyss is winning. What holds them together, what feeds and enables their internal atrophy, is Rome itself.”
The introduction also tells us that in the original Italian, “…these are signature words in this novel... ‘Sfiga’ means bad luck, the way ‘sfigato’ means inept, unlucky, loser, downright pitiful, a word that coincides with another word in the novel, ‘sfinocchiato,’ meaning dejected, exhausted, f’ked up.”
The main story is that he meets a much younger woman and they fall in love. Happily ever after? (view spoiler)[ Of course not, because they are both so ‘sfinocchiato’ that their ability to relate other people is as screwed up as everything else in their lives. (hide spoiler)]
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Rome was mentioned above, so here’s some more from the introduction, saying the book is a love story to Rome. But is it? I’m not sure. “Rome is the lingering, glamorous patina that blinds the characters of Last Summer in the City to the very real fact that they are seriously damaged and marooned. Despite their few moments of mirth and pleasure, each is an emotional cripple. What afflicts them all, if observed from a purely literary perspective, is a classic case of existential anomie.”
Here’s the author on Rome, and catch the punch line at the end:
“Rome by her very nature has a particular intoxication that wipes out memory. She's not so much a city as a wild beast hidden in some secret part of you. There can be no half measures with her, either she's the love of your life or you have to leave her, because that's what the tender beast demands, to be loved. …If she's loved she'll give herself to you whichever way you want her, all you need to do is go with the flow and you'll be within reach of the happiness you deserve. You will have summer evenings glittering with lights, vibrant spring mornings, cafe tablecloths ruffled by the wind like girls’ skirts, keen winters, and endless autumns…Every now and again, someone did get the hell out.”
At one point his drunken best male friend sums up their lives with this politically incorrect statement: “If I were a fag, I'd fall in love with you. Wouldn't we make a lovely couple?... We’ll turn gay and then at least we’ll be something. This way, what are we now? We’re nothing, not even fags.”
Do we want to go on this ride? I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure why. First published in 1973 (although dates vary), the novel has become a kind of ‘cult classic,’ getting republished in 2010, again in 2016, and in English in 2021. Natalia Ginzburg, one of my favorite Italian authors, has spoken highly of the book. I did like his great writing. And there was a lot of local color. Here are some passages that illustrate his writing style and occasional humor:
“There are people who have the singular characteristic of asking for help while at the same time giving you the impression they're doing you a favor.”
“Books make different impressions according to the state of mind you read them in. A book that struck you as banal on a first reading may dazzle you on a second simply because in the meantime you suffered some kind of heartbreak, or you took a journey, or you fell in love.”
“In the afternoon I went to the movies, to keep warm, but the film was dull as dishwater, and, for the first time, the gaunt faces and secretive shenanigans of the destitute fans that populate theaters in the afternoon made me really sad.”
“It was dawn, and all that remained of the night were two shadows under the eyes of this strange girl by my side.”
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A woman he is with comments after using the bus station toilet: “Maybe they keep it locked because they're afraid someone will go in and clean it.”
“'What was your name again?' 'Leo Gazzara,’ I said. ‘It still is.' 'What a sad name,’ she said after a while. ‘It sounds like a lost battle.'”
“So this is where you live,’ she said again, still looking around. ‘It looks like a shelter.”
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The author (b. 1947) is mostly known as a scriptwriter in Italy for film and TV. He has written seven novels but it appears that Last Summer in the City is the only one translated into English (2021). There are a lot of conflicting info on dates with this author and this book may have originally been published in Italy in 1970 or 1973. I've also seen his birth year listed as 1939.
Photos of Rome in the 1970s: top from hemmings.com, second from vintag.es third photo from wantedinrome.com The author from fazieditore.it
The introduction tells us that our main character “…is certainly an unlikely detective or hero. He’s a timid, sexually repressed mama's boy; the narraThe introduction tells us that our main character “…is certainly an unlikely detective or hero. He’s a timid, sexually repressed mama's boy; the narrator describes him as ‘an honest, meticulous, melancholy man; not very intelligent and indeed at times positively obtuse.’ ” He’s a schoolteacher who lives with his mother in Sicily.
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[Speaking of the Introduction, if you want to enjoy the detective story aspect of this book, don’t read it first because it gives away most of the story.]
The story opens with a group of men, including the teacher, who meet frequently at the local pharmacy after hours to smoke and have a bull session. The pharmacist tells them he has just received a threatening letter and shows everyone the note. It’s made up of letters clipped out of a newspaper and it reads “This letter is your death sentence. To avenge what you have done, you will die.” Since there is no gossip about the pharmacist having another woman – so no wronged husband - the presumption of the group is that the letter is a joke. But the very next day the pharmacist and his hunting partner are found murdered in the woods.
The police are useless so our antihero takes up the case. He has a few clues to work with: the letters on the threatening note were cut from a distinctive newspaper; there was a cigar stub found at the scene of the murder, and someone in town had been gathering notes on an important local man for some kind of exposé.
We’re in Sicily, so, as we are told in the introduction, we have a lot of cultural baggage to deal with. The pharmacist had perhaps married his unattractive wife to take over the pharmacy business from her father. After the pharmacist is murdered, his widow and his memory get little sympathy from the locals. The widow's relatives tell her, in effect - we told you so: that's what you get for 'marrying down.’ His relatives say that's what happens when you marry above your class. Or, as we are told in the introduction, the locals believe that if you change your station in life, if you presume to attain wealth and happiness, then suffering and disgrace and death overtake you all the more quickly.
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The introduction goes so far as to tell us that when someone in Italy hears the common expression “The dead are dead; help the living,” northern Italians presume this is in reference to an accident; southern Italians and Sicilians presume it’s in reference to a murder!
As the teacher interviews people about the murder, interwoven with the story are opinions on politics (Socialist? Communist? Fascist?), religion, women's lib and Italy North versus Italy South. As he conducts his detective work, the teacher is astute enough to know that just about everyone is lying, withholding information, or trying to mislead him.
We often hear about famous opening lines of books, and not so often about famous closing lines, but I'll nominate the last words of this book for the latter category: “He was an ass.”
I liked the book and the writing. It’s almost a detective story. It’s short, not quite a novella, 155 pages. This is my third book by this author and I liked this novel better than The Day of the Owl. The other book I read was a collection of short stories, The Wine-Dark Sea.
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Sciascia’s experience of growing up in Sicily and going through fascism (b. 1921; d. 1989) made him an expert in the dysfunction of Italian society. That was his theme. He was a journalist and always on TV. The introduction tells that in his time he was the most famous public intellectual in Italy, always writing and being interviewed about Italy’s political turmoil in the days of the Red Brigades and the attempts to control the Mafia. So kind of like a Gore Vidal or a William F. Buckley, although I don’t think we in the US have anyone that fits that category at the moment.
Top photo, the author’s home town of Racalmuto, Sicily from vitivinicole.tenuteagricole24.it Statue of the author in his hometown from tripadvisor.com Italian stamp honoring the author from timesofmalta.com...more
One of the Inspector Montalbano detective series - this is my seventh. If you are a Camilleri fan, like me, you will notice that this book is a bit ‘oOne of the Inspector Montalbano detective series - this is my seventh. If you are a Camilleri fan, like me, you will notice that this book is a bit ‘over the top’ in action and violence. Montalbano even stabs someone! I explain why I think that is so at the end of this review.
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The story begins without any actual crime. The Inspector becomes interested in a huge expensive yacht that frequently docks in town while it loads up with tons of first-class food. (Food will get the Inspector’s attention!) Then he learns that there are two beautiful escort women in town who will board the boat. One woman is American, one Spanish. The Inspector and all his male staff are enthusiastic to find out more about what's going on with this yacht.
We soon learn that the ship takes billionaires out to international waters where it functions as a gambling casino. But Montalbano comes to suspect there is more going on. Then he finds out that the American FBI is involved in watching the ship and setting up some kind of sting operation. (LOL I'm not sure the FBI is supposed to be operating in Sicily.) Montalbano becomes the ship’s cook (thus the title) as an inside man on the operation. Things get wild from there.
I liked this: “ ‘To each day it's suffering, to each hour its problems,’ the aunt who raised him used to say.’ ”
His excessive hours and his obsession with his cases tries the patience of his woman friend, Livia, so the relationship is always tense. He only tells her as many lies as necessary.
This novel is also different from the other Montalbanos I have read in that it has a theme of the dysfunction of Italian society: labor troubles; trains and planes are late with no notice or explanation; water to his house is cut off, and, worst of all, no fresh fish!
It’s a fun read as the Inspector is known for his love of good food both at a local (Sicilian) trattoria and that cooked for him by his maid/cook. In this story we hear about alla pizzaiola, caponata, pasta ‘ncasciata and more. When is the last time you had some good pasta alla carrittera ? (Tuna, tomato, mushrooms.) There are sites featuring recipes from the Montalbano series on the web.
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I liked this blurb from the Italian detective writer Donna Leon about Camilleri’s stories (I happen to be reading my first of her Italian detective stories at the time I was writing this review.) “The novels of Andrea Camilleri breathe out the sense of place, the sense of humor, and the sense of despair that fill the air of Sicily. To read him is to be taken to that glorious, tortured island.”
In a note from the author at the end of the book we learn that Camilleri did not create this story to be a novel. He wrote it as a script to be an Italian/American co-produced film. But that deal fell through. Since this book was published in Italy in 2019, the year of the author's death (at age 94), I suspect it was largely pieced together by editors. And it's clear that since it was to be made into a film, a lot of the action-adventure shoot ‘em up stuff seems intended for the film. There are also some loose ends in the plot.
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The author died in 2019. He was best known for this Inspector Montalbano series, I think twenty-six in all, although some of the most recent ones do not yet appear to have been translated into English. The stories were made into a popular TV series in Italy. His hometown, Porto Empedocle -Vigata, featured under the fictitious name of Vigata in his novels, officially appended that name to attract tourists.
Top photo, Porto Empedocle -Vigata, Sicily from flickr.com Pasta alla carrittera from sicilianicreativiincucina.it The author from orion-uploads.openroadmedia.com
All our literary detectives (and those on TV) have to have their quirks, and Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone isBlack Run by Antonio Manzini
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All our literary detectives (and those on TV) have to have their quirks, and Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone is loaded. I guess we could call him a “Bad Boy” cop. He’s a happily married man, but that doesn’t stop our opening scene from being his taking an emergency call from the office while he’s with his mistress.
He's a cop who opens the window and smokes pot in his office. He’s nasty to his subordinates, insulting them about their weight, their looks, their intelligence (or lack of). He’s a bully, snapping at one of his underlings he bums cigarettes from, telling him several times “Why don’t you smoke Camels? – I prefer those.”
His bad boy actions go over the edge in a way that may turn off some readers. I’ll put that in a spoiler. (view spoiler)[ He’s a corrupt cop. With a friend and one of his subordinates, he plans a heist of marijuana. I guess his rationale is ‘it’s only pot, that everybody smokes, and we’re just stealing it from the crooks.’ He’s not above a little breaking and entering to get evidence and he has a unique way of getting a blood sample for DNA testing from a suspect – he smashes him across his mouth, cutting his lip, apologizes, and offers his handkerchief. (hide spoiler)]
The story is set in Italy. We know at the beginning that Rocco has been in trouble with his superiors because he has just been transferred from his beloved Rome to Acosta, a small ski village in the Italian Alps. (A real place.) He hates the cold and the snow and has disdain for the provincial residents. He dreams of being able to go back to Rome – he’s in love with all of it including its dirt, smog, bad smells, crowds and congestion. (view spoiler)[ Oddly, he and wife envision a retirement in Provence! That contradiction is not explained in the novel. Rocco is 45 years old, so he has a while yet before retirement. (hide spoiler)]
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On to the story. The call that disturbs him from his interlude is that a body, chewed up by the blades of the giant snow-grooming machine, has just been discovered at a ski resort. It takes a while to identify the victim. (view spoiler)[ The victim was killed with a handkerchief stuffed inside his throat – perhaps a sign of mafia reprisal for someone who 'talked?' (hide spoiler)]
There are a lot of persons of interest in this tightly knit community where everyone seems to be everyone else’s cousin: the victim’s beautiful, pregnant wife, her ex-lovers, ski instructors, a beautiful woman who runs a ski shop, the resort manager and the snow machine workers. Of course, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone will thoroughly interview the beautiful women suspects several times. (view spoiler)[ And Schiavone is not above turning the victim’s funeral into a stage setting for one of his dramatic performances. (hide spoiler)]
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I gave this book a 3.5 rounded up to 4. A good story with decent writing, and a lot of local color, but I probably won’t continue with this series. This is the first of ten books in the Rocco Schiavone series, although it appears that only the first four are available in English.
The author (b. 1964) is an Italian film and TV actor and scriptwriter. He has written collections of short stories and plays but I think this detective series is his only venture into novels.
Two photos of Acosta; top from the-pasta-project.com; lower from powderhounds.com The author from harpercollins.ca
One of the Inspector Montalbano detective series. I've read 11 of them.
A young woman has been kidnapped. Usually that means that she is being held foOne of the Inspector Montalbano detective series. I've read 11 of them.
A young woman has been kidnapped. Usually that means that she is being held for ransom but her parents have no money, so what’s going on?
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“Now where’d this brother come from? Whose brother? Montalbano had known from the start that between all the brothers, uncles, in-laws, nephews and nieces, this case was going to drive him crazy.”
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The missing girl’s boyfriend helps Montalbano. He has sharp insights and wants to be a lawyer. Is he being TOO helpful? The girl has a dying mother and a befuddled father who aren’t going to be much help with anything.
There are a few clues: a wrong-facing motorbike the girl traveled on; her missing helmet. Then her kidnappers start communicating and they send a picture. Is she being held in the bottom of a wine vat?
As in all of Camilleri’s novels there’s humor: Livia is opposed to Montalbano agreeing to be the godfather to a new grandchild of his cook. Montalbano explains that the infant “…hasn’t yet had the time to become a repeat offender like his father.”
There’s the usual friction between Montalbano’s cook/maid and his woman friend, Livia. “Instead of actually cooking, Livia hinted at cooking.”
“Mr. Luna looked exactly the way his name would suggest: lunar. Round, full-moon face, obese, full-moon body.”
This story doesn’t have as much about food as some of the author’s more recent ones, but still, when is the last time you had really good ‘coniglo al’agrodolce'? (Sweet-and-sour rabbit)
I liked this blurb from the Italian detective writer Donna Leon: “The novels of Andrea Camilleri breathe out the sense of place, the sense of humor, and the sense of despair that fill the air of Sicily. To read him is to be taken to that glorious, tortured island.”
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[Edited for typos 3/9/24]
Top photo of the author's hometown of Porto Empedocle -Vigata, Sicily from tripadvisor.com The town of Savoca in Sicily from thepointsguy.global The author at the unveiling of a statue in his honor at Porto Empedocle -Vigata from shutterstock.com...more
A classic. Certainly THE classic Sicilian novel and some critics say it may be THE classic Italian novel. It’s the story of a wealthy Sicilian prince A classic. Certainly THE classic Sicilian novel and some critics say it may be THE classic Italian novel. It’s the story of a wealthy Sicilian prince set around 1860 when Garibaldi is unifying Italy (the Risorgimento). Garibaldi’s men, the Redshirts, have landed in Sicily with the intention of taking control of the island over from the Bourbons, a dynasty that also controlled France and Spain at times.
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Here’s what life is like for the Prince, Don Fabrizio. His big family, including governesses and live-in tutors and the local priest dine together every evening, so every meal is like a state dinner. The children and their nannies/governess/tutor all stand if he so much as walks by the door of a room they are in. (view spoiler)[ On many evenings he visits prostitutes in town but he makes the priest go with him on the journey to pretend it’s some kind of legitimate visit. Of course everyone knows where he is going and the priest goes to visit other priests or monks in town. (hide spoiler)]
He’s wealthy of course, an 1860s Master of the Universe, but his mansion near the main Sicilian city of Palermo, and his summer home inland, are ancient with a scent of decay to them; perhaps crumbling grandeur or ‘shabby sheik,’ long before that term was invented. His homes are not just mansions but feudal fiefdoms with hundreds of acres and hundreds of peasants living on them and paying a good portion of their crop as rent. The King of Naples is godfather to his children.
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The Prince isn’t really worried that he or his family will be killed or that his wealth will be taken away – he’s too wealthy and too politically savvy for that. In today’s terminology, “he’s too big to fail.” (view spoiler)[ (He’s eventually asked to be a senator in the new government.) (hide spoiler)] But he is uncertain and annoyed by the inevitable changes he knows must come. If any single line in the novel summarizes his position it may be this one: “I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.”
To help secure his family’s future he works behind the scenes to have his favorite nephew (whom he sees as having more savor faire and common sense than his own son) marry into an up-and-coming nouveau riche family. The nephew and his fiancée spend a lot of time courting in the empty rooms of the mansion. His nephew has a classic line about change too: "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change."
The Prince’s hobby is astronomy. He loves the precise calculations he can make about planetary orbits, undoubtedly because they are precise and predictable, certainly compared to the societal and political turmoil he experiences around him.
I liked the story, the writing and the detailed geographical descriptions of the country. It has a good rating on GR, 4.1. I'll give it a 5 and I'm adding it to my favorites. Some other lines I liked:
“Yes, Don Fabrizio has certainly had his worries those last two months; they had come from all directions, like ants making for a dead lizard. Some had crawled from crevices of the political situation; some had been flung on him by other people’s passions; and some… had sprung up within himself…”
“…but although she did not love him, she was, then, in love with him, a very different thing…”
“In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all.”
The novel was made into an Italian film in 1963 starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale.
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This is really the only major work by the author (1896-1957). It is based in part on the life of his great-grandfather and the author lived in mansions described in the story.
[Edited to hide spoilers 5/4/24]
Top photo, the library in the Palazzo the author lived in near Palermo, from townandcountrymag.com Scene from the film from sensesofcinema.com The author from romecentral.com...more
Old and new short stories from Sicily. I’ll borrow some language from the introduction and the blurbs: We’re in a region o[Revised and edited 6/28/24]
Old and new short stories from Sicily. I’ll borrow some language from the introduction and the blurbs: We’re in a region of the world where secrecy and suspicion predominate. The pillars of society - church, state and family - war on each other. Privilege means less about getting things for yourself than denying them to others. The characters are armchair anarchists, scheming priests, closet mafiosi and political hacks. We see them in their daily activities ranging from comic to tragic. Do we all want to go on a cruise with these folks? LOL
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As with any collection of stories like this the quality is mixed but there is also great variety in the types of stories, almost as if the author is letting us sample his life’s work. There are fables and a couple of stories that are really essays. The short stories range from historical to modern.
There’s no real plot in the title story, but it’s one of the best. A man in his 30s is traveling by train – 20 hours from Rome to Sicily counting time on the ferry. He’s trapped in a train car with a family with bratty kids. He’s attracted to their nanny and he starts thinking about having a family.
In The Ransom, a young woman has to decide if she will marry an old man with money and political influence who will get her sister’s husband out of jail.
Trial by Violence starts with two Jack-the-Ripper type murders of young women in Sicily in the late 1800s. Someone has to be arrested. The only evidence against the young farm hand who is charged is based on a phrenological examination of his, his parents’ and grandparents’ shaven heads. Guilty or not guilty? (I have the impression this story was based on newspaper accounts of the day.)
Demotion deals with a Catholic saint, Philomena, who is “demoted” by the Vatican. The local church is named for her, as are some girls in the town, and miracles have happened. The town women will march over and set the priest straight.
In The Test, a Swiss businessman is in town to recruit Sicilian girls to go live in Switzerland and work assembling mechanical devices. They have to pass a test. The priest helps organize it and the testing is done in the church. How and why is the mafia going to get involved in this?
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A local newspaper carries an advice column written by a priest. In A Matter of Conscience, someone has written in, giving the name of the town, outlining her adulterous affair, and asking for advice. Speculation is rampant. This could be the event of the year!
In Mafia Western the killing and revenge killings by two rival mafia groups is so out of hand that even the mafia bosses can’t control it.
Philology is a tongue-in-cheek essay about the derivation of the word mafia; I’m sure it loses much in the translation. Euphrosyne gives us a bit of history about a legendary Sicilian beauty in the 800’s.
Of the 13 stories about a half-dozen were quite good. So a 3.5 rounded up to 4.0.
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An Introduction and the blurbs tell us that the author (1921-1989) is famous in Europe for “politically sophisticated detective novels” and that he “invented the metaphysical mystery novel.” He was a prolific author – more than 40 novels – although only a few have been translated into English. I read what is perhaps his best-known murder mystery To Each His Own which I rated as a '4'. I also read and enjoyed his The Day of the Owl, although I only gave that one a ‘3.’
Photo of Palermo from previews.123rf.com Town in Sicily from eurail.com The author from lasicilia.it...more
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