Book Review - The Patience of the Spider by Andrea Camilleri

Review by Stephen M. Buhler

The Patience of the Spider
Andrea Camilleri
Penguin Books

This is the eighth of Andrea Camilleri’s Sicilian mysteries featuring Inspector Salvo Montalbano to be translated into English. The novels have been an international success, inspiring a popular television series in Italy, which has also been aired (with subtitles) in Australia. While The Patience of the Spider builds on past developments and relationships among recurring characters, newcomers to the series will still be able to negotiate their way through its intricate interplay of personalities, bureaucracies and histories. In part, this is because Camilleri integrates vivid depictions of Sicilian culture, geography and temperament with the mysteries that his Inspector endeavors to solve. In part, this is also because the author encourages his readers to care, with Montalbano, about the world that the detective inhabits.

In this novel, Montalbano investigates the kidnapping—an all-too-common occurrence in the criminal and political worlds of Italy—of a young woman. As suspicion increasingly focuses on one individual, Montalbano once again confronts the endemic corruption and hypocrisy of his country’s power brokers, especially during the unholy symbiosis of big media, big business, conventional piety and rightist politics of the Berlusconi era. (Readers interested in learning more about Berlusconi’s place in the Italian consciousness should look at Tobias Jones’s insightful The Dark Heart of Italy.) The Inspector insists, however, on doing his job thoroughly, despite pressures from career-minded superiors and conservative television commentators. The author endues his complex hero with a knowing sense of justice: amid the competing grievances and outrages of ideologues, functionaries and mafiosi, it is sometimes possible to do the right thing or, at least, to make the wrong thing known. Montalbano also demonstrates considerable powers of empathy (if not of intimacy: his personal and professional relationships have been passionately detached from the beginning) and here reflects on the power of empathy itself.

Andrea Camilleri, Montalbano’s creator, embodies much of Sicilian and Italian history. He was born in Porto Empedocle, in Sicily’s province of Agrigento, in 1925 and so grew up during the ascendancy of Mussolini’s Fascists. His own political sympathies went in the opposite direction and he has long been associated with leftist causes and organizations. His birthplace is the inspiration for the fictional town of Vigata, where Montalbano is stationed, and Camilleri has explored the weight of the past upon individuals and their families—the political divides of the 20th century merely the latest strain placed upon an island subjected to waves of conquerors, factional turmoil and various forms of exploitation. After years as a celebrated teacher and director of theater, based in Rome, Camilleri began his writing career in his 50s with historical novels. In 1995, he turned to detective fiction with the first Montalbano mystery, The Shape of Water. Throughout the series, Camilleri’s English translator has been the accomplished poet Stephen Sartarelli, who, along with vivid prose, provides illuminating background notes on Italian cuisine, culture, current events and its ever-present past.

Montalbano is both a fully realized character and a decidedly literary creation. Camilleri delights in foregrounding his policeman’s links with other great fictional sleuths, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly. Montalbano’s melancholic sympathy toward a wide range of criminals owes a great deal to Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, as does his appreciation of honestly made local cuisine. His love of food is also shared with detective Pepe Carvalho, protagonist of mysteries written by Manuel Vazquez Montalban of Spain—whose own name is echoed in that of Camilleri’s hero. In the second Montalbano novel, The Terra-Cotta Dog, Camilleri allows the Inspector to meditate on his relationships with his fictional forebears, with his long-time girlfriend Livia, and with his devoted housekeeper and cook Adelina. One evening he savors Adelina’s “simple but zestful culinary imagination” in the form of “pasta with tomatoes, basil, and black passaluna olives,” followed by “fresh anchovies with onions and vinegar.” “Relishing every bite in silence,” he realizes, is “yet another bond that tied him to Livia,” who also never speaks when eating. Further, it occurs “to him that in matters of taste he was closer to Maigret than to Pepe Carvalho, the protagonist of Montalban’s novels, who stuffed himself with dishes that would have set a shark’s belly on fire” (The Terra-Cotta Dog, pp. 41–42). Spain’s Montalban, who died in 2003, similarly explored the burdens of social, political and cultural history through detective novels—and similarly celebrated the glories of traditional food, in this case the sometimes highly spiced concoctions of Catalan cookery.

Although Montalbano bears some resemblance to Raymond Chandler’s literary-minded (and named) Philip Marlowe, Camilleri himself has expressed impatience with that detective’s form of rugged individualism and with that author’s byzantine plots and lack of interest in political dynamics. Camilleri is much more impressed with Dashiell Hammett’s combination of hard-boiled realism and social conscience. His own novels capture the flavor of everyday (often vividly profane) speech, including Sicilian dialect, along with all the other flavors, smells, sights, sensations and sounds of everyday life in that part of Italy. Inhabitants of the island and visitors to Sicily attest to Camilleri’s sensitivity to the extreme contrasts on the island: natural beauty next to man-made ugliness, mountains ending abruptly with a drop into the sea, light and dark, power and powerlessness, humor and despair, life and death. Some of this is suggested by Montalbano’s distinctive synesthesia, a blending of sensory perceptions which allows him to experience odors as colors. (See The Patience of the Spider, p. 148.) Camilleri also makes Montalbano just as sensitive to the impact of combined social systems on how individuals, families and communities behave.

Like all the Montalbano novels, The Patience of the Spider is filled with lively dialogue, sharply observed descriptions, vibrant characterization and dramatic shifts in tone. The drama comes easily to its stage-savvy author, who recently collaborated on a translation and adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for another reconstructed Globe Theatre, this one in Rome. (In line with Montalbano’s fondness for the underdog, the adaptation apparently makes Caliban the play’s most sympathetic character.) Some of Camilleri’s writing happily anticipates its translation to the television series: It’s easy to imagine how most scenes will play out before the video camera. After discovering a surprising turn in the kidnapping case (and one that will be compromised if anyone knows he’s discovered it), Montalbano beats a hasty retreat to a nearby village called Lower Brancato. This “clean little town” boasts “a tiny piazza, church, town hall, café, bank, trattoria, and shoe store. All around the piazza were granite benches, with some ten men sitting on them, all aging, old, or decrepit. They weren’t talking, weren’t moving at all. For a fraction of a second, Montalbano thought they were statues, splendid examples of hyperrealist art. But then one of them, apparently belonging to the decrepit category, suddenly threw his head backwards and laid it against the back of the bench. He was either dead, as seemed quite likely, or had been overcome by a sudden desire to sleep.” (The Patience of the Spider, p. 185). The scene soon explodes with life (and more food) when the Inspector is recognized and welcomed by the town’s vice-mayor—who just happens to be related to Montalbano’s clownish assistant, Catarella.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, English playwright J. B. Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls, in which a mysterious detective appears at a comfortable English home ostensibly to investigate the circumstances of an unfortunate young woman’s tragic suicide. As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that the Inspector’s real mission is to confront the inhabitants of the house with their callous complicity in that death. Priestley challenges not only class attitudes but all forms of categorization by which certain kinds of people are judged to be unworthy of care or concern. Through his Montabano novels, Camilleri explores similar questions of social responsibility and justice with honesty and humor, with outrage and compassion. The Patience of the Spider especially considers the personal costs of corruption on its victims and also on those who seek to exact retribution on behalf of those victims. The novel acknowledges that empathy alone is not enough to help achieve justice. Its chilling conclusion goes on to insist that without the empathetic instinct, even the most deserving seekers of justice can lose their humanity.

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