Excursion to Tindari

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Excursion to Tindari

by Andrea Camilleri

THE LITERARY WORK

A detective novel set in Sicily during the late 1990s; published in Italian (as La gita a Tindari) in 2000, in English in 2005.

SYNOPSIS

Inspector Salvo Montalbano attempts to solve two seemingly unrelated crimes: the execution style murder of a young womanizer and the mysterious disappearance of a quiet elderly couple.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Born in 1925 in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, Andrea Camilleri held a string of jobs in television (mostly with the Italian public network RAI), film, and theater before retiring to become a full-time writer. Married with three children and four grandchildren, he currently lives in Rome. His first novel, Il corso delle cose (The Order of Things), was not published until 1978, and he wrote for another 15 years or so before achieving his current enormous fame. It derives almost entirely from the popularity of his crack detective Salvo Montalbano, whom Camilleri first introduced in La forma dell’acqua (1994; The Shape of Water). Camilleri was 69 at the time. Thereafter, he placed Montalbano at the center of several more novels, including II cane di terracotta (1996; The Terra-Cotta Dog), Il ladro di merendine (1996; The Snack Thief), La voce del violino (1997; The Voice of the Violin), La gita a Tindari (2000; Excursion to Tindari), and L’odore della notte (2001; The Fragrance of the Night). Camilleri also writes historical novels set in Sicily, among them II birraio de Preston (1995; The Brewer of Preston), La concessione del telefono (1998; The Telephone Contract), and La mossa del cavallo (1999 The Knight’s Move). The Montalbano series, however, outstrips these in popularity, and has been adapted for Italian television and translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish, and English, earning Camilleri accolades both at home and abroad. No doubt, the series owes much of its appeal to its richly drawn main character—Inspector Montalbano. He is well read, passionate about good food, and driven by intuitive, sometimes mystical thought patterns. Another compelling feature is the series’ loving depiction of Sicily, Camilleri’s homeland and the setting for Montalbano’s actions. In the author’s hands, Sicily is as much a living presence as Montalbano himself. In fact, in Excursion to Tindari, as in the other novels from the series, one cannot imagine Montalbano apart from the land that shapes and sustains him. Although it has its share of problems, the detective takes them in stride as he finds ways to carve out a rich existence on the island.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Sicilian Mafia

Few subjects in the world of crime have fascinated readers more than the Mafia, especially since Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel about the Italian American Mafia, The Godfather. Of course, there are some similarities between the Italian American and Sicilian Mafia organizations, but also each is intimately tied to its own historical context. The context for Camilleri’s novel depends on knowledge of the Sicilian “Cosa Nostra” (as the Mafia in Italy is called), particularly of developments over the last 25 years.

The existence of Mafia groups dates from the mid-nineteenth century, but details about the organization and operation of this infamously secretive group were for years difficult to detect. The effort to describe the organization, membership, and activities of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra has been made easier by the 1000 or so defections of Sicilian Mafiosi since the mid-1980s. Camilleri refers several times in the novel to the phenomenon of the so-called pentiti (literally, “repentants”), who, in exchange for leniency from prosecutors, give evidence against their former associates. From these informants, we have learned that Cosa Nostra comprises a loosely knit confederation of Mafia families, about 100 in all, with a total membership of about 3,500. This appears a small number until one calculates the size of the Sicilian Mafia in per capita terms. Here, a comparison of the U.S. and Sicilian Mafias is striking: about one in 1,500 Sicilians belongs to Cosa Nostra, whereas in the United States, the figure is only one in 165,000. In addition, as opposed to the U.S. Mafia, which has little direct influence on politics and little direct involvement in the state per se, since its beginnings Cosa Nostra has been deeply intertwined with government. The Sicilian Mafia has in this respect been a socio-cultural force in Italy that transcends its status as a criminal organization.

Although its origins are still somewhat enveloped in mystery and uncertainty, the Sicilian mafia dates back to the Unification of the Italian peninsula under the Savoy Monarchy. In 1860 the Island of Sicily was liberated from Bourbon rule by the volunteer army of the national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, but not all Sicilians welcomed the liberation and the promise of modernization. The very term “mafia” may have derived from an area of grottoes in which Sicilian landowners began to assemble bands of faithful picciotti (literally, “children,” but in jargon, “mafia foot soldiers”) to organize forms of resistance, first to Garibaldi and then to the representatives of the new Italian state. In essence, the Mafia constituted itself as an anti-state organization bent on preventing “northern” (modern) institutions from taking root in the Sicilian territory, and on defending aristocraticrural values from the encroachment of all forms of modernization. To understand the Mafia, one needs to remember that in Italy there exists a clear distinction between the state and the government. The state (made up of the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and police forces) is symbolic of threatening new processes: secularization, democratization, and capitalist urbanization of the economy. Not only have these processes taken away power from rural elites; they have also eroded their cultural identity since the early nineteenth century. On the other hand, the government represents the powers that control and may delay such processes, and therefore have been seen as the natural allies of Cosa Nostra. Since its beginnings, then, Cosa Nostra has used its criminal activities to create an alternative economic, social, and cultural world that challenged the state, meanwhile trying to preserve pre-modern values of rural-patriarchal societies. Naturally, Cosa Nostra has evolved in time, and its criminal activities have tended to become ends in themselves. But Cosa Nostra’s long-standing involvement in government affairs has granted it continuing influence on Sicilian life. This involvement has fostered increasingly pervasive forms of corruption, as is so frequently observed in histories of contemporary Italy and portrayed in Camilleri’s novels. Today estimates of the economic impact of criminal organizations in Italy range from a high of 12.5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (output of the domestic economy) to a low of 4.4 percent; even the smaller number makes the Mafia the second largest business “firm” in Italy (Ginsborg, p. 201).

As witnessed in Camilleri’s novel, Cosa Nostra is a patriarchal group characterized by secrecy, discretion, elaborate codes of honor, the practice of omertà (silence), and a commitment to absolute loyalty to the membership. When new recruits are initiated into Cosa Nostra, they form strong “brotherhood bonds” that supersede all others, including blood ties to one’s own relations (Paoli, p. 5). If called upon, the new “man of honor” must be willing to sacrifice everything for his brotherhood, even his own life. The men of honor are also instructed to deny the very existence of the group to which they belong. For Giovanni Falcone, a famous anti-Mafia prosecuting judge, the tendency of Sicilians to tight-lipped communication or a mute response (omertá) reached its height in Cosa Nostra (Ginsborg, p. 195). The Sicilian brotherhoods depend on their close relationship with various levels of government to influence a wide range of businesses—another difference from the U.S. Mafia, which historically relied on gambling as its principal source of revenue. Through a system of extortion backed by threats or violence (including murder), Mafia families levy a kind of “tax” on all productive activities in the area they control, such as construction, public works, and the like. They thus feed off the entire Sicilian economy while failing to produce any tangible goods.

In the 1960s, the Mafia moved into drug dealing, once forbidden by an informal moral code. The drug trade flourished as a result of the sharp demand for heroin in the United States. One Mafia boss summarized the effect: “We all became millionaires. Suddenly, within a couple of years. Thanks to drugs” (Ginsborg, p. 199). Subsequent criminal prosecutions in the United States revealed a link between the Sicilian Mafias and the Bonnano Mafia family’s in New York, which ran its drug operations out of pizzerias. The powerful Gambino family’s in New York was also involved in the transatlantic drug trade. Yet with the rise of the Colombian drug cartels in the mid-1980s and the decline of heroin as a drug of choice, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra became increasingly marginal to the international drug business and responded by moving into other rackets, employing its influence in municipal government to secure control over public contracts and extort money from building firms (Paoli, p. 10). Here again, however, external events affected the Mafia. The mid-1990s witnessed a steep decline in public investment and thus a drop in the amounts the Mafia could skim off. Also the Mafia itself came under attack when the Italian state responded to the threat of it with judicial tools that further weakened its influence in Sicilian life.

Criminal prosecution of the Mafia

In the first hundred years of its existence, the Sicilian Mafia killed only two “establishment figures,” one in 1893 and another in 1909 (Dickie, p. 383). The Italian state, in turn, did not vigorously root out the Mafia in Sicily, an area of the country that continued to suffer from an attitude of benign neglect by the state. It allowed the Mafia to thrive there until an especially bloody wave of murders in 1981–83, which themselves resulted in wide-scale war among the Sicilian Mafia clans for control of the lucrative drug trade. It was only after these murders that the Italian state took action, directly confronting Cosa Nostra with a sophisticated array of judicial instruments. The group now had to contend with specially appointed anti-Mafia judges, crack prosecutors, investigative commissions, and undercover operations, all of which culminated in the 1987 “Maxi-trial” that handed down a set of verdicts including a total of 2665 years in prison, 19 life sentences, and the equivalent of 8.5 million U.S. dollars in fines (in 1987 figures). During this period, courageous public servants fought a pitched battle for the rule of law against a terrifying and ruthless enemy, often at the cost of their own lives. The Mafia lived up to its image, responding to increased state repression with dramatically increased and open violence. The phenomenon of the cadaveri eccelenti (eminent corpse) became routine in Sicily, with many of the Mafia’s victims drawn from law enforcement, journalism, and politics.

In 1982 the Italian government appointed General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to be the new prefect of Palermo, the Sicilian capital. Renowned for his work in exposing Italian terrorist groups, he promised to bear down on the Mafia, but also asked for special support to take on what he knew to be a determined effort to stop him. He arrived in Sicily in April; early in August, he was still waiting for adequate support from the government; by the end of the month, he was dead, gunned down (along with his wife and bodyguard) by the Mafia as he drove to a dinner party. During the funeral, which was televised nationally, viewers witnessed an irate crowd “throwing coins at the government ministers who attended” (Dickie, p. 385).

The Italian government responded with two measures designed to hit at the heart of Mafia power. One measure made it a crime for the first time to associate with someone “for criminal purposes of a specifically Mafia nature” (Ginsborg, p. 207); the second gave judges the power to overcome bank confidentiality. Giovanni Falcone, along with Antonio Caponnetto, took on the role of leading the investigations of the principal Mafia families. So dangerous was the job that Caponnetto had to live in a heavily guarded police barracks close to his work. Their efforts, however, paid off when one of the senior Mafia bosses, Tomasso Buscetta, became a pentito, agreeing to cooperate with Falcone in his investigations. Buscetta’s testimony was one of the principal keys to the success of the “maxi-trial” in 1986–87. With worldwide media glare illuminating the spectacle, the Italian public was now focused as never before on the problem of Mafia criminal activity in their midst. Despite pressures to lessen or overthrow the prison sentences and fines, they were upheld five years later, a ruling that broke the “chain of collusion” between the state and the Mafia for the first time (Ginsborg, p. 212). Later in the 1990s, the so-called Clean Hands investigations further weakened the Mafia by exposing the practice of rigged contract bidding. Despite these setbacks, however, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra is widely believed to be biding its time until promised investment in Southern Italy, both by the Italian government and European Union, materializes. It is thought that Cosa Nostra will then resume its efforts to skim a percentage of that investment capital. In the meantime, Cosa Nostra hopes to “exhaust law enforcement pressure and to weaken the popular anti-mafia movement,” while also taking advantage of softer anti-corruption policies of the government of Sylvio Berlusconi, who was elected in 2001 (Paoli, p. 12).

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

As the novel opens, a phone call from police headquarters interrupts Inspector Montalbano’s early morning reverie, a reverie in which, with the sounds of the ocean breaking through his open window, he has drifted from images of student rebels in 1968, to thoughts of his lover, Livia, who lives in a distant town. One of his subordinates has phoned to tell him the basic facts: a 21-year-old man, Emanuele Sanfilippo, known as Nenè, has been murdered, shot in the face while entering his apartment at Via Cavour 44. With a new case to solve, Montalbano feels his “bad mood passing,” and springs into action (Camilleri, Excursion to Tindari, p. 6).

Slowly, Montalbano gathers clues to the murder. Nenè’s apartment is filled with the latest consumer gadgets—TV, satellite dish, computer, video camera. And Nenè owns, along with a humble Fiat Punto, a glamorous sports car, an Alfa Romeo Duetto, which is discreetly stowed in the garage, perhaps to conceal ill-gotten gains. The keys to his apartment were still in the door when the police arrived at the crime scene, suggesting that the murderer called out Nenè’s name, who turned around before the shots were fired. On his keychain is a key to an unknown building, a key that has, furthermore, been designed to prevent duplication.

Just as Montalbano starts piecing these clues together, a man named Davide Griffo steps forward to report that his parents, who live in the apartment building, have gone missing. The investigation now splits into parallel tracks, with as yet no link between them. In contrast to the young, high-living Nenè, the elderly Griffos have led a quiet, almost invisible life, keeping to themselves, speaking hardly a word to anyone in the building. A canvass of the apartment building yields few clues. The other residents are unanimous in their surprise at the Griffos’ disappearance. Nenè’s murder is less surprising. The residents treat the detectives with vivid tales of his raucous, late-night lovemaking, the sounds of which echoed from within his flat.

The plot now detours to love affairs of other kinds. First, Mimi Augello, Montalbano’s close friend and right-hand man, informs his boss that he has decided, after a long bachelorhood, to marry, and that he will seek a transfer from Vigàta, the fictionalized Sicilian town in which the novel is set, to Pavia, the town where his fiancée lives. This news enrages Montalbano, who cannot accept what this means—the break-up of his team. His relationship to his men is so close (and at times secretive) that one of his superiors compares them to the Mafia. Yet Montalbano himself is romantically entangled, also at a distance, though he and Livia, unlike Augello and his lover, have reconciled themselves to their separate lives. Despite her physical absence, however, Livia is a constant presence in the novel; she not only telephones Montalbano at key moments, but also humanizes him by figuring in his dreams, memories, and desires.

The novel contrasts these love plots with Nenè’s taste for pornography, the evidence for which lies in his videos, CD-ROMs, and hard drive. Catarella, another assistant to Montalbano, reports that Nenè’s computer files contain a “lotta filth. Guys wit’ girls, guys wit’ guys, girls wit’ girls, girls wit’ animals” (Excursion to Tindari, p. 44). The computer also contains a 600-page novel written by Nenè himself, along with a series of sexually explicit letters between Nenè and one of his lovers, whom the detectives believe is a married woman, in part because the letters have been copied into the computer to make them untraceable by handwriting experts.

In the meantime, we learn that the Griffos were last seen on a bus trip for seniors to Tindari, the Sicilian tourist site that gives the novel its title. The Griffos were among three dozen or so retirees who had booked tickets with a local company for the day-long excursion to Tindari. As the bus driver tells Montalbano, most of the passengers on such trips are not interested in the sites themselves, but in spending time with other retirees; they always ask for the same driver because he is willing to make frequent stops along the way. The bus invariably makes such a stop at a cafe on the return journey, but on this trip an additional stop had been requested only 30 minutes from Vigàta. When Montalbano interviews some of the passengers, he learns that the Griffos sat in the very last seat of the bus, keeping to themselves and not conversing with anyone.

Montalbano discovers that there was another key passenger on the bus, a woman named Beatrice Dileo who sold kitchenware and other related products to the other passengers along the way. Montalbano’s interview with Beatrice proves useful in several ways. First, she reveals that despite the availability of better seats, the Griffos

TINDARI

Tindari, a popular destination for locals and tourists alike, was founded as a Greek colony in 396 b.c.e. by Dionysius the Elder. Its strategic location in the hills of northern Sicily enabled the Greeks to rule the waters between the nearby city of Messina and the Aeolian Islands just off the coast, but it was subsequently controlled by the Carthaginians and the Romans. The ruins of the ancient city are still visible. Along with its strategic location, Tindari’s fame also rests on the venerated statue of a black Madonna.

The origin of the black Madonnas is a subject of academic debate. Some scholars argue that they derive from the Byzantine period, and others claim that their blackened appearance results from the accumulation of hundreds of years of soot. Still others hold that these statues represent pagan goddesses who have been Christianized. The Black Madonna of Tindari was first honored with a procession in 1905, and each year on her feast day (September 8), thousands of pilgrims descend on Tindari to view the Madonna.

stubbornly chose the rear seat, which was piled with boxes of merchandise, and from time to time turned around to look through the rear window. Second, when the bus arrived at Tindari, the Griffos never got off, raising the question of why they went. Third, it was Mr. Griffo who requested the bus’s last stop, half an hour from Vigàta. Incidentally, Beatrice, who is stunningly beautiful, provides a possible solution to Montalbano’s imminent loss of his right-hand man; at the end of the interview Augello enters the restaurant, and is as struck by Beatrice’s looks as Montalbano. Desiring to thwart Augello’s transfer, Montalbano leaves his weak-kneed Deputy Inspector to finish the interview with Beatrice.

Montalbano’s suspicion of a possible Mafia connection to Nenè’s murder grows stronger when he receives a request for an interview with Don Balduccio Sinagra, a powerful, if also aging, Mafioso who controls half the province’s crime activity. On his way to Sinagra’s estate Montalbano mentally reviews the long history of conflict between the Sinagras and the other prominent crime family’s, the Cuffaros. In his interview with Montalbano, however, Sinagra suggests, in a brief exchange exemplifying the code of omertà, that a ruthless younger generation of mobsters enriched by the drug trade is making the old families—and their traditional ways of resolving conflict—irrelevant: “Nowadays people don’t wanna reason…. They shoot” (Excursion to Tindari, p. 113). Without saying much more than this, Sinagra conveys another key message: he wants his grandson, Japichinu, who is in hiding, to be picked up and sent to jail, in order, paradoxically, to keep him safe from the younger mobsters who will otherwise certainly kill him. Montalbano later discovers that he is to be the means to this end. But when he and his men are led by a tip to Japichinu’s hideout, they find him already dead, killed, as Montalbano infers, by Sinagra’s own men. Montalbano realizes Sinagra wants to make him a pawn in a generational struggle between Sinagra and his grandson, but he refuses to play the part. That is, he refuses to bring the murder to the media’s attention so that Sinagra can spread propaganda about the brutal young Mafiosi. Montalbano instead sends word to Sinagra that he must bury Japichinu quietly. There will be no investigation and no media coverage.

Montalbano soon learns that the Griffos have not only disappeared but have also been murdered, mob style; they were forced to kneel down, then shot in the head. Now there are three murders to solve, Nenè and the Griffos. Hereafter, the novel shifts from one investigation to the other and back again, moving from each new clue to the next. First, Montalbano analyzes the Griffos’ passbook and discovers that for two years they have received unexplained payments of 2 million lire a month (about $1,400 U.S. in 2004)—on top of their monthly pension of 3 million lire. This is a modest sum, but still unusual for retirees with no other known source of income. Second, Montalbano and Augello, following their hunch that within Nenè’s extensive media collection lies another clue, find an erotic home video hidden inside a videocassette of the film The Getaway. The video depicts a nude woman who the inspectors believe will help them solve the murder. Augello identifies the woman, whom he has seen before, as Vanya Titulescu, wife of Doctor Eugenio Ignazio Ingró, a famed transplant surgeon whose clients are spread across Europe. Augello further speculates that the video, with its faint sounds of waves lapping at the shore, was filmed at the Ingròs’ seaside villa while the husband was away, making Professor Ingró the prime suspect in Nene’s murder. It is here that the two cases become intertwined. As Montalbano predicted, his right-hand man, Augello, and Beatrice, the beautiful saleswoman-passenger, become involved. The relationship leads to Augello’s discovery that the bus driver took photographs of the pensioners, which he sold as souvenirs. When the crime lab analyzes one of the photos, it discovers a Fiat Punto through the rear window with the same license plate as Nenè’s car. The ability to see this car, Montalbano realizes, is the reason the Griffos made sure to sit in the rear of the bus.

Montalbano’s famed intuition then guides him toward the connection between the Griffos and Nenè. It involves a piece of rural land with a small building on it that was left to Mrs. Griffo by her sister. Montalbano finds the site and breaks down the door to the one-room building, only to discover a bare room outfitted with numerous electrical outlets and phone jacks. Montalbano guesses that Nenè was being employed by someone to use the building either for drug trafficking or internet pornography. His interest in the remote building led him to the Griffos, who had inherited it. The Griffos would be paid monthly on condition they said nothing about the deal or their inheritance of the land, even to their son. When something went wrong with the business Nenè was running, his employer concocted a plan to have both Nenè and the Griffos executed to conceal the arrangement. Nenè would feed the Griffos a story about their needing to get away for a day and then turn them over to their executioners at the excursion’s next-to-last stop, not knowing that he, too, was about to be killed.

Later, however, Montalbano arrives at a different conclusion, one that brings us back to the Mafia and its pervasive presence in Sicilian life. Dr. Ingró, who is a passionate art collector, incurs a debt he cannot pay, and this comes to the attention of the mob. They offer him all the money he wants to buy paintings on condition that he supply their clients across the globe with transplants taken from donors in jails, immigrant detention centers, and the like. Ingró hires Nenè to use the internet to bring the “donors” (who will all be killed) together with the patients—one of whom happens to be the mobster Balduccio Sinagra, who needs a new kidney. This is how Nenè comes to be involved with Ingró’s wife. Montalbano fits these pieces together by closely reading the novel Nenè wrote, which encrypts this scheme within the form of a science fiction story about robots and replacement parts.

The novel’s conclusion finds Montalbano drawing on scenes from his favorite gangster movies to hoodwink Dr. Ingró into believing he is about to be killed (with Montalbano in the role of assassin). Just as in the movies, however, Ingró is “saved” in the nick of time by the arrival of the police (Montalbano’s men, who feign not to recognize him). Ingró is so relieved to have his life spared that he unwittingly follows the script Montalbano has written for him by telling all. In one of his many thoughtful moments, Montalbano reflects that these crimes he has investigated reveal the new face of evil: “Pitiless crimes committed by anonymous people” (Excursion to Tindari, p. 279).

Montalbano and Sicily

The relationship between Montalbano and his beloved Sicily lies at the heart of Camilleri’s popularity as a novelist. The novel’s loving portrayal of the island—from its food to its unique dialect and sea-enriched geography—counteracts a longstanding negative image. Since the late nineteenth century, the Italian South has been seen as backward and the North as responsible for closing the gap, a situation described as the “southern question.” The southern question, by attending to southern Italy’s poverty, sharpened the focus on regional differences between the technologically advanced North and a presumably underdeveloped South. There emerged first a highly negative perception of the South as a barbaric threat to the more civilized North, and next, the conviction that it was the duty of Italy’s more advanced northerners to somehow help civilize their southern compatriots.

In Camilleri’s novels one does indeed find the constant presence of the Mafia—one of the key indications, according to some, of southern backwardness and clannishness. But one also finds a detective who is deeply read in classic and contemporary literature (Montalbano alludes easily to Shakespeare, Dante, Laclos, Doré, Kafka, Conrad, Pirandello, Montale). The detective is likewise familiar with European painting, music, and philosophy. A whip-smart inspector, he is funny, wise, loving, and extraordinarily responsive to the beauty of the land and sea that surrounds him. Such a portrayal counters the negative image of the South still held by many Italians.

The negative portrayal of the South is also offset by Montalbano’s love for Sicily as a special place with a unique history. The novel turns on an excursion to a place unique to Sicily: Tindari, a city first established by the Greeks, then successively colonized and conquered, and now as famous for its black Madonna as for the ruined walls of the ancient city. More broadly, Montalbano finds emotional sustenance in the specific geography of Sicily, particularly its seashore and hills. At several points in the novel, frustrated by clues that seem to go nowhere, he takes a swim in the ocean, sits thinking by a favorite beach, or drives into the hills to lie down below an ancient Saracen olive tree, whose branches suggest to him the interconnected events unfolding in his investigation: “He had discovered that, in some mysterious way, the entanglement, contortion, overlapping, in short, the labyrinth of branches, almost mimetically mirrored what was happening inside his head, the intertwining hypotheses and accumulating arguments” (Excursion to Tindari, p. 91). The tree is also an image for the novel’s densely woven fabric, its method of skipping from one plot line to another, its refusal of linear or directly causal explanations. The roots of this image go deep into the Sicilian earth and Montalbano’s soul.

But perhaps Montalbano’s most appealing quality is his pure zest for life, symbolized both by his complex, analytical mind (a phenomenon of all great literary detectives), but also by the delight he takes in simple, everyday enjoyments. Here, one may speak of his passion for food—surely a trait widely ascribed to Italians, but for Montalbano specifically focused on the frutti di mare (literally, “fruit of the sea”), the albacores, king mackerels, squids, baby octopi (purpiteddri), and other delicacies that Sicilians relish within hours of the fare having been pulled from the sea. From its opening scene to its very end, the novel constantly reminds the reader of the sea. Even when Montalbano is not directly looking at it, smelling it, or swimming in it, he feels the ocean in his marrow and in his stomach. When Montalbano interviews Beatrice Diello for the first time, the meeting takes place over a meal of squid ink risotto and freshly grilled sea bass. The meeting turns out to be of crucial importance to the investigation, but the novel, by examining Montalbano’s thoughts during the meal, also manages to make the scene an important testimony to Montalbano’s love for life as experienced in Sicily and through its fresh seafood. When Beatrice tells Montalbano that she is glad to talk but only between courses (so as not to ruin the pleasure of eating), Montalbano internally remarks how wonderful it is to meet one’s twin in such matters. Later in the meal, when she refuses dessert because she wants to “keep that aftertaste of the sea,” Montalbano thinks, “not just a twin, but a Siamese twin” (Excursion to Tindari, p. 84). In this and many other instances, the novel reminds its readers of a unique place and of the sophistication of the people who live there.

SICILIAN DIALECT

Camilleri’s love for Sicily’s land and culture is apparent everywhere in his novels, nowhere more so than in his use of Sicilian dialect. Among the many such usages found in Excursion to Tindari are “Madunnuzza santa!” (Blessed little Madonna); “Beddra Mattre Santtissimia!” (most holy beautiful Mother); and “sfincione” (a thick crust pizza served in Palermo). Stephen Sartarelli, who renders Camilleri’s works into English, leaves many of these Sicilianisms untranslated, retaining the local color encountered by Italians from other parts of the country when they read the novel, which is written mostly in standard Italian. The localisms remind readers that Sicily in many ways retains a distinct culture evident at least in part through its dialect. A number of Sicilianisms have been translated in the English edition—for example, “I’ve got a heart like a lion and another like a donkey,” which means, roughly. “I’m torn.” As Sartarelli’s appendix explains, Montalbano frequently uses such expressions to confuse non-Sicilians he encounters, particularly his superiors in the police force who want to reign in his independence.

Sources and literary context

Montalbano does not appear to be based on any historical person. Rather he belongs to a richly detailed tradition of literary detectives dating from the nineteenth and twentieth-century stories of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie. Like George Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, in Belgian-French literature, Montalbano enjoys good food and has an uncanny knack for intuitively discovering the hidden threads that tie together the separate clues found in any crime. But what sets Montalbano apart is his rootedness in Sicily and his profound immersion in the great tradition of western art, literature, and philosophy—a buttress against the constant threat of death he faces in his interactions with the murderous forces of Cosa Nostra. For example, when he first sees the image of a nude Vanya Titulescu captured on Nenè’s video-cassette, he immediately takes refuge in art as he thinks of two paintings, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Francisco Goya’s Nude Maja. As at other moments, he uses the world of aesthetics and literature to impose his own sensibility and notions of order on the seamy and sometimes dangerous world of crime.

Camilleri is also notable for a kind of wry, postmodern irony he takes to his subject, in which he reflects on the artifice or strategies of the detective genre itself. Late in the novel, Augello, remarking on Montalbano’s vivid imagination, suggests that he should write mysteries after he retires. Montalbano replies that he could, but it would not be worth the trouble because “certain critics and tenured professors, or would-be critics and professors, consider mystery novels a minor genre,” and omit them even from standard literary histories (Excursion to Tindari, p.255). (An observation true in some circles but untrue in others, whose members consider detective fiction as important as the realist novel or postmodern drama.)

Reception

The popular reception of Camilleri’s Montalbano series has been enthusiastic and wide ranging. As noted above, one measure of his immense popularity is the translation of his novels into several languages. But the novels are also a phenomenon in Italy. Frank Bruni, in a glowing tribute in The New York Times, notes that during one particularly heady summer in the 1990s, six of the bestsellers in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica were authored by Camilleri. The Economist, meanwhile, observes that although there are over 400 books on the Mafia in print in Italy, so greatly does the chief prosecutor in Palermo respect Camilleri’s knowledge of Mafia ways that he uses the novels as his primary cultural guide.

Camilleri’s English translator, the American poet Stephen Sartarelli, who is the recipient of many literary prizes for his own work, has rendered Camilleri’s Italian into robust, idiomatic English, while also capturing the Sicilian dialect of Camilleri’s characters. Especially noteworthy is Sartarelli’s hilarious translation of the Sicilianisms of Agatino Catarella, one of Montalbano’s lieutenants, who Montalbano, in The Terra Cotta Dog, described as becoming most muddled when “he got it in his head—which happened often—to speak what he called Talian” (Camilleri, The Terra-Cotta Dog, p. 21). Sartarelli’s ability to preserve the regional flavor of Camilleri’s prose is a remarkable feature of the English translations. Along with other strengths, such as the novel’s playful language, reviewers praise this regional flavor in Excursion to Tindari. An anonymous critic in Kirkus Reviews notes approvingly that the novel presents Sicily “with humor and without illusions” (Kirkus Reviews, p. 1118).

—Robert D. Aguirre