I have written about Andrea Camilleri before, but I must return to him, my admiration has increased with recent reading riccardino (2022). This brilliant conclusion to a long series of novels starring curator Salvo Montalban completes a collection of 33 titles dedicated to the character who catapulted its author to the top of the literary world. With this surname, Camilleri paid tribute to his friend Manuel Vásquez Montalván, also a writer of detective novels, and established in the universal imagination the hero of the reduced world, that of Vigato, a city invented on the model of the Sicilian city, the origin of the author.

in constant exposure

I will not have the life to consume such a quantity of narratives, but a few titles are enough for me to taste the genial word, the seascape, the colloquialism that comes – for me, by translation – from the delicious popular register of stories belonging to the various circles of criminals from which Commissioner Montalbano emerges gracefully and always intelligent.

IN riccardino, Salvo competes with himself. At the time it was written, in 2005, the television series that had been filming in Italy since 1999 had already become so popular, with the content of individual novels and an endless number of client-inspired scenarios for the writer to play with. the idea that when Montalbano walks the streets people mistake him for the actor representing him. That vein is fully exploited, to the point of establishing a relationship between the Author (a character) and Montalbano (also a character). This counterpoint reminds Spanish speakers of Cervantes (when the writer finds folders in which he learns about the existence of the knight errant) and García Márquez (because in Chronicle of the announced death there are responsibilities for the author), enriches the story to the extent that it marks the top moments in the narrated investigation.

From Alexandria to Avignon, the first stop

The reader of his novels knows that the novelty will come amid the established features of his protagonist.

Ricardo’s diminutive corresponds to a resident of Vigata, who was killed in front of three friends who happened to be on a sports walk. The plot intersects with phone calls, love seductions, bank loans until the “big beast”, the long arm of the mafia, enters the fiction. In managing a complex plot that does not alter the serene demeanor of a curator who is able to simultaneously live his almost platonic relationship with his girlfriend and his abundant gastronomic morsels, Camilleri is a master. The reader of his novels knows that the novelty will come amid the established features of his protagonist. He knows that Salvo’s brain produces its best ideas when it’s walking its digestion on the beach. You know intuition works.

Camilleri says that he kept the novel for eleven years, because at the age of 80 he felt it was time to say goodbye to Montalban. In 2016, he retouched it, but the editor published it a year after the writer’s death. All these dates converge to single out a unique way of closing the literary life of one of the emblems of Italy. Today, when tourist routes are created around Sicily to recreate the adventures of Montalbano, when millions of copies of the novel have been sold, translated into 36 languages, when the television series has ended fifteen seasons until 2021, we can appreciate the importance of what looks like entertainment. (OR)