100 years of Andrea Camilleri

Il birraio di Preston (1995) is considered by many to be the masterpiece of Andrea Camilleri. The novel takes its cue from a real historical episode reported in the Inchiesta sulle condizioni della Sicilia: a chain of intrigues, crimes, and unrest triggered by the incomprehensible, stubborn determination of the prefect of Caltanissetta to inaugurate the royal theatre with an obscure opera, Il birraio di Preston, a melodrama by Luigi Ricci. The year is 1874, and the recently achieved unification of Italy is put to the test by this “northern” choice, to which the local population counters with Vincenzo Bellini. Before long, riots erupt, culminating in the burning of the theatre. Facts, versions, schemes, and misunderstandings chase one another, and multiple truths intersect in the town, as each protagonist—Piedmontese officers, Mazzinian conspirators, local power brokers, and a whirl of minor characters—intervenes in their own way. It is a novel of powerful comic force and narrative mastery, drawing on History as its point of departure; Camilleri once said: “I have no capacity for invention that does not have a real reference; I always need a starting point, something that has already happened.” And here History appears wearing the violent and absurd grimace of farce.

With the novel Inseguendo un’ombra (Chasing a Shadow), Andrea Camilleri takes us to fifteenth-century Sicily to tell the story of a man who, over the course of his life, assumes three different identities. Samuel Ben Nissim, a young Jew from Caltabellotta, is highly learned and possesses a true vocation for languages. Having taken refuge in a friars’ convent, he is instructed in the Catholic faith and takes the name of his godfather, Count Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada. From Sicily to Rome, and then once more on the run, he adopts a new identity—Flavio Mitridate—managing to draw close to a humanist such as Pico della Mirandola.It is an adventurous journey across the Mediterranean, through Rome and on to Germany, among intellectuals, courtiers, and criminals, in an attempt to grasp the essence of a chameleon-like man. His life, the writer maintains, “is made up of a series of tightly focused spotlights: he is caught in full light, then he vanishes, disappears into nothingness; he reappears under another name, another guise, another role. Years of silence, then yet another name, back in the light again—ultimately, a figure of extraordinary fascination, and it is no coincidence that Leonardo Sciascia defined him as a shadow.” Camilleri plunges into the story of this tormented, elusive soul, reconstructing the life of Samuel Ben Nissim / Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada / Flavio Mitridate “as if he had not really existed, but as though he were an invention entirely conceived by me. And after all, does not invention come from invenire, which in Latin means to rediscover, to find again?”

The King of Girgenti is perhaps Andrea Camilleri’s most representative book. In it, linguistic experimentation blends with the study of historical and social settings; playful tones alternate with dramatic ones; and the narrative draws on multiple genres, including the fantastic. It was the novel the author loved most—almost a manifesto of his political and libertarian passion, and exemplary of his creative method. It begins with a “kernel” of truth concerning an episode that took place in Girgenti—later Agrigento—in 1718, when the insurrectionary populace proclaimed as king a peasant named Zosimo.
From this spark, Camilleri invents the biography of Michele Zosimo, a popular leader whose reign lasted only six days, and develops it like a cuntu, against a backdrop of fantastical tales and vivid characters. Camilleri recalled having come across a book titled Owed to the Iroquois, dedicated to the Indigenous peoples of North America. “The moment I came across the three lines about Zosimo, I knew I would write—not because of the singularity of the event, but because I owed something to my Iroquois, something owed to the Sicilian peasants, owed to the postwar land occupations, owed to their generous history, always defeated! That is why I wrote The King of Girgenti.”

In 1929, Prince Brhané Sillassié, grandson of Negus Haile Selassie, came to study at the Royal Mining School of Caltanissetta. Starting from this true event, Andrea Camilleri assembles an imaginary dossier consisting of dense correspondence between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the prefect and chief of police of Montelusa, the Fascist Party secretary of Vigàta, and the director of the Mining School. The subject of this hilarious exchange is how to treat the illustrious student, who is demanding and extravagant, fond of luxury and beautiful women, and eager to take advantage of his position. At Mussolini’s own suggestion, the prince is urged to write a letter to his uncle Haile Selassie filled with effusive praise of fascism—something that might prove useful in the dispute between Italy and Ethiopia over the Somali borders. And at this point, the story turns into pure farce.
With The Negus’s grandson (2010), Camilleri returns to the subject of the Fascist era: “I tried to exorcise and understand fascism by writing three books. The Taking of Macallé, then Untitled, where the fiction and virtuality of the regime appear, and the last one, The Negus’s grandson, in which I describe the stupidity and idiocy of fascism. I hope I won’t have to write any more.” With sharp and contagious irony, the author cleverly blends truth and invention, and in the process delights us by enjoying himself.

Andrea Camilleri recounts that after The Shape of Water, published in 1994, Inspector Montalbano was not yet a fully formed character. “I had the sensation that he still had one foot raised. So I wrote the second book in the series, The Terracotta Dog. At that point, the character had become a character even for me.”
Information provided by a mafia informant about an arms trafficking operation leads Montalbano to inspect a cave, where he discovers a passageway to another cavern. There, he finds the bodies of two young lovers. They are embracing, abandoned for decades, watched over by a huge terracotta dog. The inspector thus finds himself conducting two investigations: one into a dangerous mafia clan, and the other into a murder committed in 1943, during the chaotic days preceding the American landing in Sicily. And it is the latter that captivates him the most.
What makes The Terracotta Dog a unique novel is not only the layering of two plots, two crimes, but the interweaving of elements from the Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus with those from the Qur’anic version of the same tradition: “You would have thought them awake, while they lay asleep, and their dog stretched out its paws on the threshold.”

Collected here are the novels Maruzza Musumeci (2007), Il casellante (2008), and Il sonaglio (2009). It was Camilleri himself who brought them together under the title Trilogy of Metamorphoses, at a point in his literary journey when he wished to explore other landscapes: “Around the age of eighty, I started to grow rather tired of the highways I’d been traveling for some time—the Montalbano highway and the highway of historical and civic novels. I realized there were exits that led to unexplored landscapes. So, with Maruzza Musumeci, I took one of those exits, writing something completely different: a novel about a metamorphosis.”
After Maruzza, the mermaid woman, Camilleri, in Il casellante, tells the story of Minica, who is transformed into a tree by grief and violence; and in Il sonaglio, the tale of Beba, a wild yet extraordinarily human goat who transmigrates into the young noblewoman Anita.
Though one’s thoughts may turn to Homer, Ovid, the legend of Colapesce, or the myths of Olympus, the myth lives on in literature, with references to Tomasi di Lampedusa and Landolfi, Soldati and Ortese, standing as testament. Yet Camilleri never forgets History—his mythical figures are anchored in reality, in the major events of the twentieth century—world wars, fascism—and in crucial themes such as poverty and oppression, rape, and the mafia. Myth and fairy tale, the real and the fantastic, come together to create three true masterpieces.

In the special series dedicated to the hundredth anniversary of Andrea Camilleri, eight stories in which the master of Vigàta has fun recounting Montalbano before Montalbano—eight investigations that revealed to readers a Camilleri who is a prodigious magician of the art of storytelling.
Set in the 1980s—amid Italy’s Sindona scandal and the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II—these are highly diverse investigations, involving real estate speculation, drugs, kidnappings, family feuds. And the mafia. In his early thirties, Montalbano is instinctive, not very respectful of the rules; yet he possesses a deep humanity and a keen understanding of people. He naturally sides with the weak and already displays the traits that will define him in his mature years.

“And in any case, he was an anomaly even for me. He portrayed contradictions that led to further contradictions. He is resistant to authority. Bravo. Yet he is undeniably and indisputably a cop. I’m under his spell, damn it.”

Zerocalcare

La relazione (first published by Mondadori in 2014) belongs to the group of novels that Camilleri writes in limpid Italian, abandoning, just for a moment, Vigatese, his language of invention and of choice. The reason for this choice lies in the very subject matter of the novel; it is a bourgeois story, set in contemporary Italy and not in Sicily. Mauro Assante, an upstanding civil servant, is given a delicate assignment: to write a report on the Santamaria Bank over which the shadows of illegality are stretching. In a scorching Roman summer, with his wife and child at the beach, Assante begins to draft his report, but finds himself at the center of impalpable maneuvers that seem to want him to desist from completing the job. A visit from a beautiful as well as unknown girl, strange phone calls, subtle allusions, and anonymous letters plunge the official into an intrigue in which he becomes fatally entangled. “I was interested in trying to unhinge all the certainties of a man like Assante in today’s Italy. I wanted to understand how such a structured life, so rational, can be disrupted and unhinged by the irrational.” The report is at once thriller, psychological novel, and reflection on power, and Camilleri’s passion for theater and his penchant for civil and political themes emerge strongly there.

Andrea Camilleri, with his bitterly humorous tale, delves with these two investigations into facts of Italy’s post-unification history. And he brings to life the massacres of 1848 in Sicily obscured by the authorities and forgotten by historians, and the agreements, the compromises between friends, encouraged by the clergy with the absolution of sins in exchange for an obolus, within which the Mafia made room to the detriment of the state.
Two of Andrea Camilleri’s works are brought together here: 1984’s La strage dimenticata and 1993’s La bolla di componenda, two narrative essays, two chronicles that probe between the folds of history and reaffirm the duty of memory.
Two heinous massacres took place during the uprisings of 1848: the first took place in the Bourbon prison of Porto Empedocle, where the prison commandant decided to kill 114 convicts convicted of crimes against property so that they could not join the rioters; the other took place in Pantelleria when 15 peasants were massacred by the island’s notables behind specious accusations. Between family memories and found documents Camilleri reconstructs those episodes in order to avoid another massacre, that of memory, and he does so with chronicler’s accuracy, anecdotal richness and tenuous humor. Of the Bolla di componenda is found in the proceedings of the 1875 Parliamentary Inquiry into the conditions of Sicily. It is a kind of written absolution that was sold in confessionals for sins committed or to be committed. A compromise, a secret agreement between powers, a practice to which post-unification Italy adapted with brigandage and the Mafia. Camilleri in his investigation of the bubble alternates archival documentation with narrative invention, sometimes indulging in fantasy.

«Camilleri wrote because he enjoyed it, and it is evident that while writing La concessione del telefono, he had a lot of fun. And along with him, the reader has fun too, constantly accompanied by the author’s irony and the increasingly hilarious twists of a classic comedy of errors. But this divertissement is not just about laughter; in fact, at a certain point, it risks not being funny at all. As the story progresses, it becomes all too clear that there is something worse behind it: the eternal drama of Italian bureaucracy, but above all, a millennial pessimism that takes for granted that things that start badly will end even worse, that anyone who tries to bring a minimum of rationality and common sense into madness will be crushed, and that every system rewards the worst».

Alessandro Barbero

The year was 1677 when, in Palermo, the Viceroy Don Angel de Guzmán suddenly passed away. The Kingdom’s counselors, initially struck by grief, were soon overcome by shock: in his will, Don Angel had decreed that his wife should assume the functions of Viceroy until the King of Spain made his decision.
Thus, against all laws and customs, Donna Eleonora di Mora found herself governing a Sicily ravaged by epidemics, famine, and poverty. Yet, defying all expectations, she managed to rectify the injustices of the Sacred Royal Council and improve the dire conditions of the people.
Her most revolutionary measures were those in favor of women: she established the conservatorio per le vergini pericolanti to provide orphaned girls with financial support and prevent them from turning to prostitution; she introduced a royal dowry for the neediest young women who wished to marry; and she implemented benefits for large families. All within the span of a lunar cycle.
Courageous and determined, Donna Eleonora, as the author describes her, was “a towering female figure, the only woman to govern in a male-dominated world; a magnificent example of power exercised responsibly for others, standing in eternal contrast to those who wield power for their own gain.”
Among the pages of history, Andrea Camilleri unearthed traces of this forgotten revolution and transformed them into a novel rich with imagination and pathos. With a special note by Chiara Valerio.

The Shape of Water is the first novel featuring Inspector Montalbano of Vigàta. Camilleri wrote it in 1994, and it was a true breakthrough—not so much for its inventive language, but for the way its protagonist was constructed.
In 2014, Michele Serra wrote:
“In his debut scene in the world of literature, Salvo Montalbano is absent. Or rather, he is present, but not among us. He is with himself. He is sleeping. And he is dreaming. Not just any dream, but an erotic one—an intense embrace with his distant yet close Livia. His dream is abruptly interrupted by a phone call from Sergeant Fazio. A man is dead, a new case has begun. Torn from himself, dragged out of bed, interrupted in the most intense and private of psychic ecstasies, the inspector curses as he tries to grasp ‘not so much the receiver, but the fleeting remnants of the dream that was inexorably fading away.’ It is the relentless metaphor of a birth—a sudden and traumatic call into the world. From a protective womb—sleep, the woman, the embrace—to his duty. Those remnants can never be stitched back together; that dream is forever broken. From that moment on, Salvo Montalbano belongs to us: his creator has delivered him to readers and viewers alike.”
A novel that felt like a revolution, and with it, Montalbano would achieve the rare and coveted fusion of popularity and literature. The book also features a special note by Antonio Manzini.