I wonder if Camilleri's long exierpence as a theatre director might not lend itself to his conjuring up inventive narrative that avoids the "information dump." That kind of exposition is even more deadly on stage than it is in film/TV. Camilleri's Montalbano novels are the only English translations of his many writings and that's a shame. For English-language readers he's a writer of superb crime fiction but for Italians he is so much more. I am loathe to say he might even be considered an "icon".Re Jacomuzzi... He appears in many of the Montalbano short stories, some of which were made into TV episodes. I believe he exited the novels at the same time that Salvo got a new "questore" -- a hostile one, for whom Montalbano has no respect, to replace the retiring one with whom Salvo had a very cordial relationship. This was a necessary plot device if Salvo was ever to avoid the dreaded promotion which his earlier questore kept threatening him with.
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Congratulations on finishing the book!If you chnage the title, there is a risk that people who bought the first edition will buy the revised edition thinking it is a new book, and so be disappointed and even sightly swindled. So if you do decide to rename it, you need, I think, to be up front and make it clear on the front cover and in the publicity (including of course the web site) that it is an updated edition.I've been enjoying Inspector Montalbano on BBC four recently and have just borrowed the first in the sequence from the Lit & Phil Library, to read on a rainy day, of which we seem to have a plentiful supply. I was lucky enough to meet the translator, Stephen Sartorelli, when he visited Newcastle three or four years back. He was fascinating on the way he addressed the challenge of conveying the Sicilian dialect into English.
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the right things, but Camilleri makes you feel them." Good oosvreatibn, Peter. Leon is one of those writers who really ought to have a nonfiction sideline where she could vent her ideas straight out rather than having them filtered through a not-very-convincing mouthpiece.This annoying tendency has reached its nadir in John Shannon's latest novel about oh-so-compassionate LA private eye (and don't you forget it!), Jack Liffey, On the Nickel, wherein each chapter ends with a "drawn from today's headlines" quote, a polemic from the author for whom it apparently isn't enough to write a novel about the despair, brutality, and shamefulness of life on Skid Row in one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Nope, Shannon has to hit the reader (who probably is already at least somewhat in sympathy with the author's point of view, or s/he wouldn't be reading the novel in the first place) over the head with his "isn't it an outrage" end-of-chapter asides. Sheehsh! That these seem to be positioned more to bring fellow outraged readers together in a "right on, man!" chorus, rather than to bring the unconvinced into the fold is doubly irritating.Camilleri is a harsh critic of the current Italian administration and has spoken out about everybody from Berlusconi, to the Minister of Education, and so on. But when he writes the Montalbano fiction he tempers this anger and blends it smoothly into the fabric of the story. I never feel I'm being told how to think or feel a certain way when reading Camilleri. A too-common feeling when reading a lot of today's crime fiction. His assumption that his writing alone will draw you in to seeing his point of view, take it or leave it, is far more persuasive.
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