Fifty Shades of Meaning.

I've had a problem with the last two books I've read: in the first case the fault lay with me, in the second with the text itself.
 Last month Angiola lent me Una bella estate, a collection of three novellas by the neo-realist Cesare Pavese, which was first published in 1949, the year before his suicide. In the Thirties Pavese had translated A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Italian and in some ways Una bella estate reminds me of Dubliners, with Turin and its hinterland replacing the Irish capital. Like Joyce's short stories, Pavese's novellas depict protagonists suffering from varying shades of loneliness. And here lay the problem. My normal approach to reading French or Italian fiction is to plough on regardless of whether I've understood every word. Usually when an unfamiliar word has reappeared a couple of times the contexts will have established the meaning. And if they don't, as long as I've got the general drift it doesn't matter. But with Pavese this approach didn't function: as with Dubliners, his stories' meanings were revealed through subtle variations of tone rather than through plot. So despite taking several weeks to read 300 odd pages, I can't claim to have fully appreciated the work. Or, more accurately, to adopt the perspective of the Reader-Response critics, the text which I created was vastly inferior to those created by a native speaker. Nevertheless I enjoyed the stories, particularly the second and the third: Il diavolo nelle colline and Tra donne sole. In the latter Pavese employs a female narrator, Clelia, the only male author I can recall doing so apart from Defoe. No doubt there are countless others, some of whom I may have read, but my memory is rather shaky these days. Clelia was an interesting, if sad case. Like Catherine Earnshaw, and Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson in The Fall, she saw no connection between sex and love. For Clelia, like Stella, the former was simply a pleasurable activity, like eating in a good restaurant. For Cathy it was simply something to pacify her husband when he'd been upset by the emotional intensity of her reunion with Heathcliff.
  Unlike Una bella estate, my next book, Camilleri's latest detective story, Un covo di vipere, only took a couple of days to read. As always with his Montalbano tales, it was strongly plotted and there were no great subtleties of tone. Unfortunately there was no great subtlety of plot either: I'd guessed the identity of the assassin very early on. 'Guessed' is probably the wrong word: her identity was blindingly obvious. As the novel progressed succeeding events only served to strengthen my original hypothesis. I kept on hoping that I was wrong: surely making a character seem so obviously guilty must be a red-herring? It wasn't, and Camilleri's disappointing form continues.