Mystery author # 31: Andrea Camilleri

Translator: Stephen Sartarelli
Series detective: Inspector Salvo Montalbano
Type of investigator: Police
Setting & time: Vigàta, Sicily (and neighbourhood), Italy; late 20th century

This time, I read two books by the author. Note that the given year of publication is for the original Italian publication.

Title: The Shape of Water
Original Italian title: La forma dell'acqua
No. in series: 1
Year of publication: 1994
Type of mystery: Death under mysterious circumstances (possibly murder), police procedural

Story: A famous and respected Sicilian political leader is found dead from a heart attack. There is no doubt of the cause of death, but as the circumstances of the finding of the body and the place where it was found are rather suspicious, Inspector Montalbano decides to get to the bottom of it, despite pressure from the authorities to close the case. Was it an accidental death during a sexual encounter with a prostitute, or was the heart attack manufactured, making it a murder?

Rating: A fresh, sneaky and entertaining police procedural. 4 stars.
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Title: The Voice of the Violin
Original Italian title: La voce del violino
No. in series: 4
Year of publication: 1997
Type of mystery: Murder; police procedural

Story: Inspector Montalbano's curiosity leads him to the body of a young woman who has been murdered during or after sex. Her purse, full of expensive jewellery, is missing, so robbery appears to have been the motive, but the clues show that in all likelihood she knew her murderer. When the case is taken from the local police and handed over to the carabineri who proceed to make things more complicated, Montalbano seizes the opportunity to put one over an obnoxious police commissioner, but he also has to deal with some serious regrets caused by his own mistakes.

Rating: A fine and entertaining murder mystery. 4+ stars.

Author review: I have found a new "must read more" author in Andrea Camilleri. The narrative technique in both books combines humour, skilful writing and great plotting, and Stephen Sartarelli's translations are very good. Montalbano is an instantly likeable character, and the plots are a heady mixture of passion and cold calculation, interspersed with glimpses of Sicilian life and the ways of the Sicilian people. I can't wait to read more. 4 stars.

P.S. For those who are unfamiliar with Italian/Sicilian society, there are explanations of some of the things a reader may stumble over, in the last pages of the book.

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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