Andrea Camilleri: Un mese con Montalbano (Thirty Short Stories, First published by Mondadori Editore in 1998)
Andrea Camilleri studied film directing, then worked for 20 years as a director for the Italian television (RAI) and produced films such as the Italian adaptation of Maigret’s investigations. After the success of his first novels, The Shape of Water was published in 1994, which is the first volume in a series on Inspector Montalbano. The Inspector lives and works in a fictional small Italian town called Vigàta, inspired by the author’s own hometown, Porto Empedocle. The novels and then the TV series made from them gained such popularity that the city of Porto Empedocle changed its name to Porto Empedocle Vigàta. Inspector Montalbano has become famous not only in Italy but also in the UK, Australia and North America. Camilleri had written the last mystery of his detective almost two decades before his death, but he held it back. The manuscript of the novel Riccardino was locked in a safe from which it was only retrieved in 2017. Finally, a year after the writer’s death, it was published in 2020 and it is available in English from 2021.
Inspector Salvo Montalbano is the leader of the Vigàta police station. He loves silence and delicious food. He does his job honestly and fairly and strives to satisfy both his superiors and the people he needs to protect. In this book, we can read 30 short stories, including some of the inspector’s early cases. The novels are special because the plot does not detach from the economic, social, and political context — the writer deliberately wanted to depict his own age. Although he stated in his commentary on this book that any coincidence in the names of places and persons is a coincidence, he adds that life (which is usually beyond our wildest ideas) is no more than a mere coincidence…
