The Inspector dines
I’m reading the Inspector Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli). Murder, the human condition, and food—why didn’t I think of that? Oh right, because I don’t know how to write about food. The novels are all set in Sicily, in the town of Vigata, which was based on Camilleri’s hometown of Porto Empedocle, which has been renamed Vigata in honor of the series. The middle-aged Inspector Montalbano may be the most charming police detective currently in print: funny, cynical, possessing a finely-developed sense of the ridiculous and a passion for food. His lowest moments are triggered by the evil that men do, the Berlusconi government, and bad food. He flees in horror from the vice-commissioner’s wife’s cooking, and falls into a depression when the owner of his favorite trattoria retires. He is overcome with disgust when his assistant Mimi Augello (male) sprinkles Parmesan on a dish of pasta with clams. Montalbano solves mind-boggling cases with intuition, logic, and inspiration derived from literature (he loves Faulkner). He’s been involved with his girlfriend Livia forever, but has managed to avoid marrying her; meanwhile he fends off the advances of beautiful women such as Ingrid the Swede. He’s also a synesthesiac—he perceives smells as colors.
A terrible meal reads like this: “Montalbano took a bit less of a liking to Giulia, owing to the shamefully overcooked pasta, a beef stew conceived by an obviously deranged mind, and dishwater coffee of a sort that even airline crews wouldn’t foist on anyone.”
A good meal: “He gobbled up a sauté of clams in breadcrumbs, a heaping dish of spaghetti with white clam sauce, a roast turbot with oregano and caramelized lemon, and he topped it all off with a bitter chocolate timbale in orange sauce. When it was all over he stood up, went into the kitchen, and shook the chef’s hand without saying a word, deeply moved.”
The translator provides helpful notes on Sicilian culture, history, and dialect at the back of the book, viz. “sardines a beccafico: a famous Sicilian specialty named after a small bird, the beccafico, which is particularly fond of figs; indeed the name beccafico means ‘fig-pecker’. The headless, cleaned sardines are stuffed with sauteed breadcrumbs, pinenuts, sultana raisins, and anchovies, then rolled up in such a way that, when removed from the oven, they resemble the bird.” Mmm.
Do you know of any Filipino detective novels?
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 11th, 2007 at 21:44
Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan is a detective novel.
July 25th, 2007 at 08:31
Exactly…’Smaller and Smaller Circles’ by FH Batacan. I never liked it. Our discussion of it in class (God that was so long ago) treated it like a detective novel with an awkward spin: what with the dashing mestizo no-angst Atenean pro-bono protagonist of (siyempre, para pogi) Italian descent; his angsty criminal profiler sidekick; the news reporter with a crush on the ‘bida’; and the perpetrator being a traumatized UP Manila student.
One classmate highlighted this campus-class struggle slash people-are-really-good-inside crap in class: “O ano? Kase Atenista? Kaya mayaman, kumpleto forensic tools, good upbringing and all that. Tapos, pari sila, kaya hindi corrupt like the cops that get in their way. Tapos, yung killer, panalo. Taga-UP ito, sister. Rags-to-lower middle class, raped by his male PE teacher in high school, worked his abused ass to get through college. Traumatized kaya pumapatay, kaya forgiven in the end, kase hindi masama-to-the-core, deprived lang of love, or some shit like that.”
I’ve never read a book review of that novel as acid-honest as what that classmate of mine said.