Andrea Camilleri Rights List for Sellerio Editore Historical Novels

The early Roman years, theater training, early career, in letters to family.

There are many ways in which Andrea Camilleri’s youthful family letters can be received. One, however, transcends all others. It is the way of reading a horoscope: of an observable astral configuration drawn by the zodiacal signs and planets, metaphorically transposed into the letters that systematize and determine the predictions about the mature inventor of Inspector Montalbano, a knowledgeable reader of the same favorite books by the still unconscious letter writer; and of that irresistible imp called Catarella, the embodiment of a blatant gesturality and theatrical comedy already brought to the stage in the sketches improvised by Camilleri in his messenger papers.

Camilleri is young, very young. He loves theater. And as a director he also has rhabdomantic skills. He makes water gush where everyone sees only dry bushes and stones. He sniffs in the air, as well. He catches the coming wind. It anticipates the times, staging authors as yet untried in Italy. Their names are Ionesco and Beckett. These are the years 1957- 1958. He happens to be looking for an actor up to the part. He can’t find him. He likes to take a chance. And he decides to replace the actor with a mannequin. The success is resounding.

One Saturday, with Friends is Camilleri’s most surprising novel, first published by Mondadori in 2009. It is not a detective story. Although the encumbrance of a corpse is not lacking, with the questions it raises, on the sidelines of a fake as much as murky attempt at blackmail. Nor does it lack, the non-mystery, a strong narrative tension: immediately inaugurated on the cover by that warning sign given by the comma in the title that makes the qualification of friendship at least ambiguous, if not deadly. The novel is ruthless. For it, Camilleri has divested himself of the humorous flourishes and colors of vigatese. The unredeemable theater of horrors has imposed on him a dry Italian: fast, sharp and cold; even chilling. Deliberately unspecified is the location of the story. The town has no name. It is abstracted from any reference. Friends make a weekly date for themselves. It is the Saturday night reunion. For once, they involve in the ritual a comrade long given up for lost. The guest is uncomfortable, socially different. He is openly gay and a communist. He has no money. Most importantly, he holds photographs that are heavily compromising for a member of the fellowship. He is found dead. He had fallen accidentally, leaning drunkenly over the parapet of the terrace, it was agreed. But who had given the push, if push there had been?

A collection of three short stories for the first time together in a very enjoyable reading.

Camilleri’s stories are always seductive, even when they leave out the sonorous fascination of vigatese and elusive scrambling of a spoken Italian between twists and dialectal touches. Counting, in one case and in the other, is the extraordinary exactitude of the author’s writing. In the trio, which here makes the book, find trim compositions of different narrative configuration, of equal inventive quality, and very enjoyable reading. Two of the short stories are dated 2005. The other is from 2011. Symptomatic is the short story Troppi equivoci with its severely cinematic construction. Captions scroll across the page screen as in an old-fashioned film. A necklace of onerous memories gives the title to Il medaglione. Marshal Antonio Brancato commands the Carabinieri Station of a mountain village in Sicily. More than anything, he is a family counselor, a peacemaker. He solves everything with theatrical cunning (Montalbano-style). Set in Montelusa, in the year 1862, with offshoots in the following two years, is Il giudice Surra. The protagonist of the historical tale (a Piemontese who descended to the land of Sicily) is armed with a candor that disorients the brotherhood, or mob, and makes him enigmatic, alien to the entire country; it makes him ignore threats, intimidation, and even an assassination attempt.

Vigàta’s stories never cease to surprise, they all spring from literary suggestions, traces of the past, chronicles, many draw on Camilleri’s real life, they go through History. Six perfect tales, accomplished enough to constitute almost a novel. A web of stories, that is, a proliferation of surprising plots. The usual expressive concentration, the scenic writing of brilliant lucidity, and the humorous talent, allow Camilleri to translate the playful into the satirical with ease, making the tragic play with the comic: without, however, excluding moments of emotional enchantment, as in the tale The Four Christmases of Tridicino. The collection opens with a “comedy” of misunderstandings and betrayals, with slyly mischievous flashes. It closes with a sea tale of powerful Verga ribbing, cast in a world suffused with ancient and sorrowful wisdom: «Life is like the undertow: a day brings a thread of seaweed to shore and the next day takes it back. […] Now that it had brought ‘this great present, what would the wave of undertow have taken back again?».

The Pensione Eva rises in Vigàta in an archaeologically mythical place, where in distant times a Greek temple, a Roman temple, and a “little church for mariners and sailors” had succeeded each other. And from this “chosen place” one day the guests of the inn board (in turn, out of metaphor and as if in counterpoint) a German military ship to bring consolation, comfort and charitable relief against the “horror,” to the soldiers so disheveled by wounds that the ladies in Fascist uniforms, gripped by “upset”, refused to visit. Love stories born in the inn, which is an open window to the world. It makes one “something about the world.” It educates to life. And it is pleasantly visited by a prodigality of astonishing tales: visionary at times, and even hilarious-chivalric on an Ariosto basis or otherwise touched by the mad rope. The tales germinate prodigiously, attract, and are immediately incorporated into the construction of the novel.

La Pensione Eva is an amarcord: “a narrative vacation,” which Camilleri has given to himself and his readers “in the imminence” of his “eightieth birthday”.

The monologue Andrea Camilleri had prepared for his return to the theater. A profound reflection on Good and Evil that calls readers to pronounce the verdict.
«Because I am a storyteller. After all, I have never been anything else. In Jewish tradition, and to some extent in Muslim tradition, there are a myriad of counter-stories that tell us a Cain very different from the one in the Bible. We have worked on these». Andrea Camilleri offers a version of Cain far from the usual one. He is perhaps a Cain inventor of choice, who goes beyond repentance by becoming aware that “without evil good would not exist”. Like the previous Conversation about Tiresias, this monologue was also to be performed by Camilleri in the theater. The date was for July 15, 2019 at Terme di Caracalla. But the great writer left the stage too soon.

The story of the famous soothsayer, a myth declined over the centuries by writers, poets, philosophers, playwrights. With the strength of his storytelling, Camilleri gives us a unique and valuable work.
«Call me Tiresias. In the manner of the writer Melville, the one from Moby Dick. […] Ever since Zeus, or whoever, decided to take away my sight again, this time at the age of ninety, I have felt the urgency to be able to understand what eternity is, and only by coming here I can sense it. Only on these eternal stones».
Conversation about Tiresias written and performed by Andrea Camilleri was staged for the first time at the Greek Theater in Syracuse on June 11, 2018 as part of the classical plays produced by the National Institute of Ancient Drama.

One of Camilleri’s most entertaining and original novels: in the form of a dossier, through a collection of documents, reports, letters, even anonymous wall writings, it follows the thread of a mysterious disappearance.
A certain Andrea Camilleri, a self-styled “author” who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, sorted inside a binder a slew of documents (including confidential ones) recovered from the archives. All we can deduce about him is that he has relatives in Vigàta, probably three daughters: the “three kind sisters,” Andreina, Elisabetta and Maria Carmela. His erudition makes him as fussy as a philologist, going so far as to apologize to his readers for having included in the first of the four classifiers of the dossier the article of an approximate and even plagiaristic professor. Camilleri, in this hilarious novel (published by Mondadori in 2000), has given himself a nineteenth-century double; to whom he has delegated the implementation of a virtuoso novel of apocrypha, which is one of his masterpieces.

One of Camilleri’s most intelligent, hilarious, exemplary novels, first published in 1999 and now considered a “classic.” The action takes place in 1877: Giovanni Bovara, who was born in Sicily but moved to Genoa when he was only three months old, is sent to the island as an inspector to the mills after the two who preceded him are killed. In Vigàta he gets entangled with the local potentates but he goes straight for his path, which is that of the law. He thinks in Genoese dialect, but it is precisely this that prevents him from detecting the net that is catching him. So when the priest, a womanizer and reputedly a moneylender, is killed, the only way to defend himself from the paradoxical situation in which he has found himself- that of being accused of the crime he denounced – is the horse’s move. Giovanni Bovara therefore sets out not only to speak but also to think in Sicilian, a dialect he thought he had lost, but which blossoms spontaneously from his lips and proves to be the key to understanding what has happened and above all to checkmate those who control an entire country. In short, an authentic provocation that reverses the trap made-up for him.

In Vigàta, the stage of all Camilleri’s stories, protagonists and extras move; they act, but they are real people, because of the feelings they have and the adventures they live, they advance on the scene at the pace imprinted by the author, with a musical background that is the reckless and irresistible language he invented. Eight tales set in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that seem, despite the temporal distance between them, to compose a single novel. They all present a slow-burning humor, which does not erupt except off the pages, in the readers’ reactions. Camilleri overheats the scenes shrewdly, to release in the end volatile delights that are perfectly enjoyable, highly entertaining.

There are eight short stories, all written in a state of happy and amused creativity. They are from a “sepia” Vigàta, set between 1910 and mid-century, almost. And they include an investigation by the discreet Inspector Bennici into the chronicle of two picturesque ghosts who had stirred up the town council, the townspeople, regional and national newspapers. Was this the beginning of a haunting?Camilleri is a storyteller, no one like him can captivate readers with his tales, inexhaustible as those of the Thousand and One Nights. Vigàta is the theater where his characters dwell: well-to-do bourgeoisie, naive poor people, men of respect. And above all women; in this collection, in fact, love is the dominant theme, declined in its countless variations from passion to eroticism, from betrayal to Boccaccio situations.

This is not a novel of manners. It is not a historical novel. It is a powerful narrative action. If in the game of chess the ultimate goal is to capture the king, the operative mode and the pursuit of this strategic option force the silence and darkness of history, to face the mystery of a “shadow,” to penetrate the many masks of a face that one can think but not know, to capture the contrived personality of a protagonist of real events who with infamous talent evolves on himself and under multiple names transforms himself; here Camilleri plays chess with the imponderable. His character’s paths multiply, blur, interchange with one another. They start from the giudecca of Caltabellotta, Sicily, and along the fifteenth century […]. The reader does what he can to catch his breath. One page pulls the other, swirling. Amid various warnings of danger and horror, the novel’s protagonist unleashes twisted intelligence, cruelty and ruthlessness.

Raffadali, province of Agrigento, 1920s. The Sacco brothers are free men with strong ideas about socialism and the State. Their lives change radically one morning when their father, Luigi Sacco, receives an anonymous letter from the local Mafia demanding protection money and is the victim of a robbery attempt. Luigi tells the police of the extortion letters he received, but the police don’t know what to do: no one in the village has ever dared denounce the Mafia before. From that moment on, the Sacco brothers must defend themselves: from the Mafia and the forces of order, from their collaborators, traitors, and from the village’s leaders, as they are assailed by murder attempts, false accusations, and false testimony.
Through the tale of the Sacco brothers and what happens to the town of Raffadali, The Sacco Gang makes clear that not only does the mafia kill people, but it can also condition and irreparably devastate people’s lives.

Sicily, April 16 1677. From his deathbed, Charles III’s viceroy, Anielo de Guzmán y Carafa, marquis of Castle Rodrigo, names his wife, Doña Eleonora, as his successor. Eleonora de Moura is a highly intelligent and capable woman who immediately applies her political acumen to heal the scarred soul of Palermo, a city afflicted by poverty, misery, and the frequent uprisings they entail. The Marquise implements measures that include lowering the price of bread, reducing taxes for large families, re-opening women’s care facilities, and establishing stipends for young couples wishing to marry – all measures that were considered seditious by the conservative city fathers and by the Church. The machinations of powerful men soon result in Doña Eleonora, whom the Church sees as a dangerous revolutionary, being recalled to Spain. Her rule lasted 27 days – one cycle of the moon.
Based on a true story, Camilleri’s gripping and richly imagined novel tells the story of a woman whose courage and political vision is tested at every step by misogyny and reactionary conservatism.

Eight unpublished stories by Camilleri, eight perfect tales that, as always, manage to amaze, move, excite, and make people laugh. Influential characters who smuggle dogs, strange wills, ice cream challenges, clumsy elopements, masquerade balls and living nativity scenes, salons with the classic three-legged table to summon unlikely spirits: all against the scenic backdrop of Camilleri’s Sicily, made up of aristocratic circles, squares frequented by strange characters, sunny beaches, and infertile lands to be cultivated with toil. The stories take place from 1893 to 1950: Camilleri does not follow a chronological path but rather the one related to the colors of his imagination, to build a mosaic of «rituals, customs, personal and collective behaviors of an era that, although recent, now seems very distant in time».

The lawyer and journalist Matteo Teresi discovers the existence of a secret sect whose members include priests, politicians, and regional VIPs. During the early morning hours, when the town’s churches are closed, the “Sect of the Angels” meets in the sacristy to carry out their holy office: initiating devout virgins into the rites of married life. Preying on their victims’ naivete, the hooded “elect” commit ignominious acts while promising the young women divine grace. In 1901, at a time of immense changes in Sicilian society, the scandal breaks nationwide. But far from being hailed as a hero, Teresi is accused of disrupting the status quo and irrationally blamed for an outbreak of disease and a series of calamities. From the salons, churches and social clubs of Sicily to the country’s highest courts, Camilleri’s novel is a fast-paced, at times funny, passionately rendered portrait of the machinations of power and the difficult destiny of a local hero.

There are eight short stories here that make a book and not just a collection. They are chronicles and almost apologies, one does not know to what extent always and truly of other times.
Camilleri’s clocks are soft. And the tales know how to raise and lower the tone. Nor do they disdain the crazy, cinematically constructed, Quentin Tarantino-esque scenes. These are tales that do not elude the great Vigàta novel. On the contrary, they contribute to it, according to a precise design.
Salvatore Silvano Nigro

«A sort of sampler of the men and women of Sicily. One is spoiled for choice».
Andrea Camilleri

Years 1929-1932. The grandson of the Negus, Prince Grhane Sollassié Mbassa was enrolled in the Royal Mining School of Vigàta. From this true fact Andrea Camilleri draws inspiration to imagine a “tasty dossier, things said and things written”: the letters, documents, news articles, in a climate of genuine general stupidity. The prince “turns out to be a virtuoso of bribery and an athlete of deception: all grumbling, he is a bravado; promising much, the authorities, and even more paying, without ever getting anything. Even the Duce foams and quivers, in Rome, and suffers gradually the Ethiopian’s cheap shots. Like the novel’s very young prince, Camilleri is also, in his own way, a fraud according to truth: he mocks and pranks by writing and inventing documents, to be in the end on the side of historical truth.

The affair revolves around the newsroom of the Sicilian RAI. The director, Michele Caruso, neglects to give the news of the notice of investigation to Manlio Caputo, son of the leader of the Sicilian left-wing, accused of the murder of his girlfriend, Amalia Sacerdote, also an important surname because her father is the general secretary of the Sicilian Regional Assembly. The girl was found dead in her home with her skull smashed by a heavy ashtray, and that corpse creates no small amount of problems, due to the political rivalries of the couple’s parents and the obvious connections to the island’s economic, judicial, journalistic and political powers.

«The labyrinthine development of the plot knots and entangles everyone. His blackest novel».
Salvatore Silvano Nigro

The young Giurlà is a goat herder. […] As a herd-keeper in the highlands, he could have been destined for the lonely fate of Jeli the shepherd. Instead, Giurlà lands on a prairie. He feels the alarm of the senses. And he seeks warmth in a goat’s fur coat, between muzzling and frolicking. The goat, Beba, is solitary: stubborn and faithful; but also of touchy jealousy. […] Beba is feral and mysteriously human. She knows how to love and be loved. Giurlà is, in turn, a lover who cannot stand the distance; nor the waiting. […] The fable of the goat-woman is one of naked tenderness.
Salvatore Silvano Nigro

«The best of me resides in this fantastic trilogy…. The first in the series is Maruzza Musumeci; after the story of the mermaid-woman, that of a woman who attempts to turn into a tree, told in The Line Inspector, and a third novel about a goat-woman: a trilogy of metamorphoses.»
Andrea Camilleri

Camilleri is the chronicler, fabulist, and mythographer of the vigatese community. He tells of Minica and her husband, the line inspector Nino Zarcuto. […] They want the grace of a son. They do their best. But the violence is a chasmous whirlpool, sucking the couple in. The pain is excruciating, heartbreaking. It petrifies. Minica is a Niobe, now in a humble rustic mythology. […]. A vegetable reverie makes her believe she can become a tree. To take root and bear fruit, after being grafted. Her husband indulges her, loving and solicitous. The son finally arrives, as miracles come: bestowed by the shocks of death and war. Camilleri lurks in the turns of tragedy. And he waits for the reader, with a lit candle in his hand.
Salvatore Silvano Nigro

Summer 1945. The Bishop of Agrigento Monsignor Peruzzo is mortally wounded by two bullets. To save the bishop’s life ten young nuns offer theirs to God, letting themselves die. Camilleri discovers this story almost by accident, from a footnote. And with the determination of the detective he «goes back up the story. He pursues faint or erased leads. He conducts a painful and tormenting investigation. He interrogates historical sources and literary documents». The narrative essay includes distant times. And topographies.
«Stony mountains, hermitages, hostile and inaccessible places. Physical spaces are transformed into geometric archetypes. […] The temperature of the writing changes gradation. It lights up in the sepia of remembrance. It fades into the black and white of the inquiry».
Salvatore Silvano Nigro

This “cunto” is a handy natural history of the Sirens. It is also a “moral history.” The story takes place in Vigàta, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Sirens are not fish with lipstick. They are fecund women, terribly seductive. They live among men. They inhabit the same places, but they do not live at the same time. They come from a depth of millennia: they are too old or too young, above life and death. […] Maruzza gets married to Gnazio. Happily. The new life of a Siren with husband and children begins. The eldest son Cola becomes an astronomer. He discovers a star. He names it Resina, after his sister, the Little Mermaid.
Salvatore Silvano Nigro

A fairy tale in which myth and history, but also art, architecture and astrology are intertwined. A boundless fantasy bridled in the tale of a life lived intensely. Camilleri’s most poetic novel.

“Untitled” interweaves the story of Sicily’s only Fascist martyr of the Two Red Years with the colossal hoax of Mussolinia, the town near Caltagirone that was supposed to celebrate the glory of the Duce forever. In an interview, granted to “La Nazione” on January 17, 2002, Andrea Camilleri declared, «I absolutely want to write the story of an imaginary hero in an imaginary country. I am referring to the story of the one-time Fascist martyr who I later found out was killed by his own people by mistake. The setting of course will be what should have become Mussolinia, the town that was never built and that was shown to the Duce, in 1928, as a photomontage».

The Capture of Macallè is set in 1935 Sicily during the Abyssinian War. The protagonist of the novel is a violated child who is transformed by the hammering fascist propaganda of the time, which among other things “sacralized” Mussolini as “the man of Providence,” into a murderer, but he is an innocent murderer because he is deprived of the opportunity to develop his critical autonomy. Camilleri returns to the pure novel. A child watches the world in the fascist 1930s and the world steals his childhood.
The Capture of Macallè is a paradoxical novel that intentionally transmutes into too much, and exceeds all measure, beginning with the promotion of a six-year-old “angilu minchiutu” to protagonist. A grotesque parable, which goes on to fable the tragic and abnormal normality of violence. A story finally, of painful tenderness for a betrayed childhood.

Set in the first 15 years of the 18th century, Camilleri’s novel is inspired by an episode in Sicilian history. These were the years when Sicily was with the Savoy, revolts and revolutions were taking place. For six days Girgenti became an independent kingdom with a peasant who proclaimed himself king. His name was Michele Zosimo, and in the days of the insurrection he apparently drank wine mixed with gunpowder. King for only six days, once the revolt was quelled, he was killed.

«Great and portentous events occur in Sicily at the close of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. “The King of Girgenti” is the great Camilleri novel we have all been waiting for».
Salvatore Silvano Nigro

A dead body is found near a small Sicilian town. Marshal Corbo begins the investigation of the intricate case. Written in 1978, The Flow of Things is the first novel by the inventor of inspector Montalbano. «The novel’s first virtue is its construction: Camilleri knows how to weave the threads of a “mystery” with rare ability, leading the reader on the dangerous and bewitched paths of mental hypothesis, of continuous questioning. But paid tribute to this skill, which dramaturgical practice may have fostered, one must emphasize the density of the Sicilian atmosphere evoked and, more so, the subtle qualities of the writing. Certain hours, certain figures appear in full evidence thanks to a soft, sly use of words that forms its own very recognizable music».
Ruggero Jacobbi, 1979.

«In the summer of 1995 I found, among old papers at home, a ministerial decree (which I reproduce in the novel) for the granting of a private telephone line. The document implied such a dense web of delusional bureaucratic-administrative requirements that I immediately wanted to write a fictional story about it (I finished it in March 1997). The grant dates to 1892, that is, some fifteen years after the events I counted in The Brewer of Preston, and therefore someone might ask me why I persist in pestle in the same mortar again and again, bringing up, almost in photocopy, the usual prefects, inspectors, etc. Anticipating the remark, I put my hands out. The opening quote is from Pirandello’s The Old and the Young, and it seems to me it says it all. To the extent possible, since this story is exactly dated, I have faithfully quoted ministers, high state officials and revolutionaries by their real names (and the events in which they were involved are also authentic). All other names and facts are instead invented out of whole cloth». Andrea Camilleri

«In 1980 Livio Garzanti wanted to publish this novel of mine, resolving the doubts of some of his eminent coworkers. He asked me, however, almost looking over his shoulder, for a glossary. Understanding his unspoken reasons, I began to fill it in reluctantly: then, little by little, I took a liking to it and had a great fun. The novel is now being reprinted seventeen years later, and the glossary, in the meantime, has become redundant. If we republish it now, it is because it subtly amuses us. The cue for A Wisp of Smoke was given to me by an anonymous flyer, found among my grandfather’s papers, which warned against the maneuvers of a rogue sulfur trader. For the rest, names and situations are to be charged to my imagination. Then, when it came out, my mother liked the novel: I dedicate it to her memory».
Andrea Camilleri

Componenda: agreement, compromise, transaction intended to settle a dispute between parties. It recalls the agreement between two private parties or bargains of hidden, murky, secret powers. It is said that the Sicilians, for long lack of it, are thirsty for the state, and Camilleri expresses this thirst in his language of comic force and popular temperament, recounting some componende, or inventing them, until he comes across the most symbolic and incredible of all. The one the ecclesiastical power guaranteed to those who, by paying an obolus according to the crime, acquired a preventive right to absolution. Many, Camilleri demonstrates, alluded to it during depositions, reports and testimonies, without the investigators ever thinking of delving into it. But then, the Bolla di componenda, the document, was swallowed up in the history of Sicily (a history that is itself a great componenda).

One hundred and fourteen names that do not appear on any tombstone in Risorgimento are listed at the end of this book, one hundred and fourteen who fell in the 1848 uprising in Sicily. “Servants of punishment”- as the convicts were called in the bureaucratic papers of the time-killed by the Bourbon police not for any particular fault except, perhaps, that they associated with the insurgents. The authorities confused and concealed their fate, and no historian has ever dealt with them. The murderers and silent accomplices made their careers, first under the Bourbons and then in united Italy. The Forgotten Massacre draws those names from oblivion, traces the killers, reconstructs the motives. It reminds us, once again, how history that seeks the acrid, tragic and humble truth is more reliable than that of the tombstones.

1870s Sicily. Much to the displeasure of Vigàta’s stubborn populace, the town has just been unified under the Kingdom of Italy. They’re now in the hands of a new government they don’t understand, and they definitely don’t like. Eugenio Bortuzzi has been named Prefect for Vigàta, a regional representative from the Italian government to oversee the town. But the rowdy and unruly Sicilians don’t care much for this rather pompous mainlander nor the mediocre opera he’s hell-bent on producing in their new municipal theater. The Brewer of Preston, it’s called, and the Vigàtese are revving up to wreak havoc on the performance’s opening night

In 1880s Vigàta, a stranger comes to town to open a pharmacy. Fofò turns out to be the son of a man legendary for having a magic garden stocked with plants, fruits, and vegetables that could cure any ailment – a man who was found murdered years ago. Fofò escaped, but now has reappeared looking to make his fortune and soon finds himself mixed up in the dealings of a philandering local marchese set on producing an heir. An absurd, quirky murder mystery that recalls the most hilarious and farcical scenes of Shakespeare and The Canterbury Tales, Hunting Season will introduce readers to a refreshing new aspect of one of our best-loved writers.