The 3 best books by Andrea Camilleri

The Italian Master Andrea Camilleri he was one of those authors who filled thousands of pages thanks to the support of his readers around the world. It began to emerge in the 90s, a fact that demonstrates the perseverance and vocational writing as the foundation for their vital longevity extended to black on white.

Virtuosity, well trained, seems to be able to accompany one at all times. His classic setting, in which he masterfully developed his dark plots, was deep Sicily, whether in real or invented spaces, but always with that roots of the great Italian island.

Although today, in his absence, surprising works are being published that spread to many other scenarios and proposals. Without a doubt a singular case of which as much work is known after his death as before.

Determine those three great works In my opinion, considered as autonomous novels, beyond the Montalbano series (name chosen as a tribute to Vázquez Montalbán), it is complicated between so much and where to choose, but once again I encourage myself with those three best novels, in this case to Don Andrea Camilleri, Let's go there.

3 recommended novels by Andrea Camilleri

Hunting season

Through a particular ironic and even caustic humor, we discover the idiosyncrasy of Sicilians, with the marks of fiction, and with a hyperbolic touch.

A comical vision of the primitive and crazy Sicilian rural universe.Vigáta, Sicily. Carmelina - a goat - was the girlfriend of the cretinous son of the Marquis Filippo, and also the grieving widow because the fool appeared dead one fine day after an ill-fated encounter with a poisonous mushroom.

The inheritance plans of the marquis therefore fell apart. He had invested a lot of time and desire to do the first one and, although he was an idiot, he was a boy and that was enough. His wife could attest to this, the lustful and continuous attacks of the noble lord left their mark on body and soul. From the day of such terrible loss, the poor woman was upset, although it was never known whether by the death of her son or by the prospect of stoically enduring Filippo's new and inordinate ardors.

As it was, the marquis looked for another woman to receive his seed. What happened from then on between the nobleman and Trisina - wife of one of the house guards named Pirrotta - only God, the complacent Pirrotta and all Vigáta knew. Soon after, people began to die: some even of natural death.

Hunting season

The death of Amalia Priest

With this novel, Andrea was uncovered as a great author of the black genre. The recognition of the RBA award for crime novels in 2008 indicated this, although in fact many of his previous books already distilled the good writer.

A very affordable novel, fast and short reading (which I don't know if it's good, because I want to read more) Amalia Sacerdote has been murdered and they are going to issue an indictment against her boyfriend. Michele Caruso, director of the RAI in Palermo, has exclusive access to this news but does not want to be the first to give it. It is too risky: both Amalia and her partner are the children of important Sicilian politicians, and the consequences of transmitting information of this caliber are unpredictable.

Nobody dares to disturb the established order in Sicily, where journalism is usually controlled and justice is a sham. So if someone refuses to look the other way, they may have to pay a heavy price.

book-the-death-of-amalia-priest

The shape of the water

Commissioner Montalbano was born here, as an independent novel that, due to public demand, ended up being an endless sum of installments for readers eager for more and more Montalbano.

On a warm Sicilian night, after swimming for a long time in the calm waters that pool a few meters from his house by the sea, Salvo Montalbano emerges from the darkness with the clearest ideas: the solution of the case is on his nose, so it is only a matter of patience and method, for which nothing better than to relax beforehand with some delicacy prepared by Adelina, her faithful assistant.

If this scene will sound familiar to regular readers of Andrea Camilleri, uninitiated readers deserve a brief introduction: Salvo Montalbano is forty-five years old, keeps a girlfriend in Genoa, and is a police commissioner for the small town of Vigàta, in Sicily. that although it is not found on any map of this world, it is more real than life itself.

A faithful friend of his friends, a lover of good food and knowing that the earth has revolved and will revolve many times around the sun, Montalbano is the living compendium of ancient Mediterranean cultures. His human qualities, together with his unerring insight, have made his creator, Andrea Camilleri, one of the most widely read authors in Europe.

On this occasion, a well-known politician and businessman appears dead half naked inside his car in a suburb where prostitution and drugs reign. Everything indicates that he has died of a heart attack after having had intimate relationships with an unknown person.

However, Commissioner Montalbano does not trust, and armed with his natural nose for strange behavior, he sets out to discover the sexual and political plot behind the alleged crime.

The shape of the water

Other recommended novels by Andrea Camilleri…

The forgotten massacre

After exhaustive documentation and based on memories transmitted by his family, the famous Sicilian author revives, in a story of bitter humor, the massacres of 1848 in Sicily obscured by the authorities and forgotten by historians.

The first massacre took place in Porto Empedocle, where Major Sarzana freed 114 prisoners in one fell swoop, suffocated them and burned them alive in a common cell; the second took place in Pantelleria, where fifteen farmers were executed on accusations of gangsters and landowners. The authorities, the Bourbons and the Unitarians, confused and hid their fate, and no historian ever dealt with them. The silent murderers and accomplices made their careers, first under the Bourbons and then in unified Italy.

a thread of smoke

When a noir genius is confronted with a more realistic narrative, the matter veers between the cartoonish and the dramatic. Of course with his inalienable dose of black humor to cope with the bad experience. Because looking at the harsh reality hurts. Narrator and reader get rid of crime fiction to discover that crime can be life itself.

Vigàta, 1890. Salvatore Barbabianca is one of the main producers of sulfur thanks to the bad arts he has used in his business, that is: stealing and fraud. His mortal enemy, Ciccio Lo Cascio, is not far behind, and the two engage in a mad fight to see how to fulfill the request of a Russian ship to load it with the blessed mineral. The wait for the ship and its fatal arrival at the port involve the entire town, which will come to confuse the worst of tragedies with an act of divine intercession.

With A Thread of Smoke, Camilleri returns to his particular vision of the world, sly and theatrical, from a remote corner of the newly unified Italy, where they care as much about Garibaldi as about the production of sulfur in the midst of naive, erotic entanglements. and gangsters, who seem to build the raison d'être of these vehement Sicilians.

a thread of smoke

Memory exercises

It is curious how in the absence of the author on duty, what could have been a disruptive publication, an extravagance in life, ends up being a rarity for mythomaniacs after his death. But also a whole approach to laymen who perhaps never read the writer who not so long ago left the scene and who here synthesizes that famous why? of writing.

The point is that as in the case (recovered by proximity in their deaths) of Ruiz Zafon with his posthumous work «The city of steam», now comes out this singular book of Camilleri which is read with that point of idolatry and longing from which everything takes on new meaning.

And so everything has a place in a volume that compiles stories and experiences, the last of them all, in that mixture of reality and fiction that ultimately defines the writer dedicated to the cause of enlarging the trade for years and years ...

Despite having gone blind at the age of ninety-one, Andrea Camilleri was not intimidated by the dark, just as he was never afraid of the blank page. The Sicilian author wrote dictating until the end of his days, and with orality he found a new way of telling stories. From the beginning of his blindness, he applied himself to the exercise of memory with the same iron discipline with which he had worked all his life. With persistent lucidity, he dedicated himself to stringing together the memories of a long and prolific life, displaying a unique mental acuity and his particular vision of the world.

This book was born as an exercise to practice this new way of writing, a kind of vacation booklet: twenty-three stories conceived in twenty-three days. In them, the author recalls key episodes in his life, portrays the artists he held most esteem and reviews the recent history of Italy, which he has lived in the first person. A literary game where sounds, conversations and images intertwine that you can never get out of your head.

«I would like this book to be like the pirouette of an acrobat who flies from one trapeze to another, perhaps doing a triple somersault, always with a smile on his lips, without expressing fatigue, daily commitment or the constant feeling of risk that has made that progress possible. If the aerialist showed the effort that it took him to execute that caper, the spectator would certainly not enjoy the show. "

Memory exercises

Km 123

In this plot Camilleri invites us to enjoy a story with the scent of love entanglement, of lovers filtered between marriages to break the convincing.

At least from the beginning that is the first impression. Because once Giulio was in a coma, after his accident in the kilometer 123 of what was the Via Aurelia that linked Rome with Pisa, his wife must take care of everything that surrounds her husband. Including your mobile phone.

And of course the missed call of this Ester awakens, in the tragic situation of Giulio's state, even worse omens for Giuditta, his wife. Because the mind is like that. Once plunged into the tragic, it is she, the mind that crudely reveals to us the unmistakable certainty of Murphy's fatality.

What can get worse will get worse. Premise under which, in addition to the suspicions of a lover for Guiditta, there appear testimonies that point to the attempted murder of Giulio at the time of his accident at kilometer 123.

As the matter grows more obscure around God knows than matters between hidden passions or unspeakable businesses, we need someone like Attilio Bongioanni, instinctive policeman, bloodhound loaded with the intelligence of the best investigator.

We said that Camilleri seems fireproof in his vocation as a writer. And it is better for us. Because in the end, as we get involved in extracting the truth and what can be derived from it, we enjoy that complementary analysis of the greats of the genre. Because Camilleri is still due to his world of black crime writers from the mid-XNUMXth century. And its plots continue to distill criticism, philosophy of survival, sagacity to delve into the wells of the human soul.

Thus, the entanglement of the novel's knot seems at times to take our breath away, like a thriller that concerns more human nature than the specific case of Giulio's accident.

The end of the story contains that strange climax that differentiates the greats of the genre, a climax that not only closes the case but also projects the essences of evil when it governs the human being.

The revolution of the moon

The figure of Eleonora (or Leonor de Moura y Aragón) in the XNUMXth century city of Palermo, stands as a personality determined to banish old vices, disastrous customs and all kinds of excesses that her husband the viceroy allowed to form a city ​​without law.

Except that all those who benefited from the chaos, those original mafias that would spread for centuries throughout the world, had in their female figure a supposedly easy enemy. If being a woman was not easy then, trying to gain power even temporarily became an impossible mission.

The old beliefs of women as tools of the devil brought from the Christian religion through the damn Eve and her apple, could always serve to lift the people in front of a woman.

The facts are what they are. The improvements in the city of Palermo at all levels are very considerable. But even though the power is supposedly Eleonora's, most of those around her will conspire against her. Too much patronage and outstanding debts.

It remains to be seen if the inhabitants of Palermo will believe all the dark accusations that fall on Leonor or if they will really appreciate the improvement in their lives since she has been here.

A novel about the dark goings-on of a Palermo city that would end up becoming the cradle of the Sicilian mafia years later. Eleonora's days could have changed everything. The struggle between immorality and illegality and what is correct, the ability to manipulate everything by touching the grain of an illiterate people. Old systems to establish fear and lies that still persist to this day… and not only in Palermo.

The revolution of the moon, by Andrea Camilleri
4.8/5 - (13 votes)

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