An Improvement.

Have just finished this year’s Montalbano novel. It was an improvement on the last four: unlike the last two - La caccia al tesoro and Il sorriso di Angelica - I didn’t work out who the guilty party was early on in the novel, unlike La danza del gabbiano Montalbano wasn’t behaving completely out of character, and unlike L’età del dubbio it wasn’t a vehicle for its elderly author’s sexual fantasies.

  Nevertheless, it was rather disappointing: Camilleri didn’t bother developing  his cast of regular characters, simply leaving them to display, mechanically,  the personal traits he’d developed in the early novels. Again, one felt the book was prompted by his accountant rather than any real desire to re-engage with the world he’d created in 1994 with La forma dell’acqua and developed so spendidly over the subsequent twelve novels and three collections of short stories. The last of the successful novels - Il campo del vasaio - was published in 2008. Since then it’s been downhill with a slight, but probably temporary, upward slope this year.


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