Goodbye, Montalbano! And Goodbye, Camilleri.
Camilleri’s final novel in the series says farewell to the form
Like many people, I only came across the novels of Andrea Camilleri through the medium of television, the murder mystery series known as “Commissario Montalbano” in Italian and “Inspector Montalbano” in the English subtitles. Each tragic and yet comical story contains two or three incidents that seem wholly unconnectable and yet are each facets of each other.
The Sicilian settings are splendid dilapidations, the recurring characters delightful in their incompetence. And yet somehow – after lunch in the trattoria or a dinner of arancini prepared by the cleaning lady – Montalbano solves the crimes by the end of each episode. Order is restored, except for the looming presence of the Mafia, the secret lawgiver and enforcer that Salvo Montalbano occasionally encounters but can never quite counteract.
In our household, we felt sad when the final episode appeared on television, and so we often watch repeats to imbibe the sunlight, honor the crumbling stonework, and reflect on the glaze on the sea, where our hero swam each morning to clear his head, and ours.
Over those years, I had never read a word that the author had written. Until now.
Called Riccardino, the book is one that – surely – will never be filmed. It was drafted quite a few years before, and before the filming of the series had ended. The character of the title, Riccardino, dies as the very first scene, and Montalbano works out who is guilty a couple of scenes before the end. That much we knew already, did we not?, even before we leafed past the title page to the first page of text. I won’t spoil your fun by discussing the plot. But let’s consider the subplot – perhaps the superplot, the plot superimposed upon the action – and think about what fiction is, what it asked of us and does to us as readers.
This story won’t be filmed because the “Author” – a character in the novel – died in real life before the book was came into print, in Italy or in translation. What actor would now dare to take such a role? And this authorial presence through the novel challenges us as readers to reflect more on the nature of and value in fiction than on the story this work of fiction tells.
The Montalbano in this story is weary – of life, yes, but also because his television persona has captured the attention of the public. These viewers expect him to act in the way that the actor Luca Zingaretti played him throughout the series.
The novel’s Montalbano gets heckled from the crowd, laughed at from the windows that overlook the scene of the crime, because he’s not like the hero they know on the screen. The novel’s Montalbano is angry about the Author, to whom he once told a story about a case he had solved; that mistake was the basis for all the noise and nonsense that has blighted his career.
During the case in Riccardino, the Author calls Montalbano, planting suggestions about how to resolve the mystery. Montalbano is annoyed. They are stupid ideas, and he lets the Author know. The Author, too, is weary but wants to write something, something more, one last fling in the brilliant sunlight, among the sandstone edifices, and along the glimmering waterfront. Their annoyance with each other, with what fame has done to Author and character, is where the meaning of this novel lies.
And novels are lies. The Author is a character, not the writer, not quite. This “real-life” Montalbano is no more real than the one fictionalized on television. Despite their differences, the two Montalbanos we readers are asked to remember are, well, pretty much the same, whatever the protesting Montalbano of the novel says.
Literary theorists call this a metafiction – a novel about making novels and making television from novels. The murder of Riccardino doesn’t matter. It’s just another murder, and it’s a work of fiction. It didn’t happen, except inside the pages of this story and the minds of us readers. It is a story that will not be filmed, if the will of the author (though perhaps not the Author) is respected. The Montalbano of this story doesn’t take orders from the Author.
We know, however, that in this meta-world, both the Author and the Montalbanos – on screen and in the pages – take orders from the author, from Andrea Camilleri, who says farewell in the Author’s Note at the end of the book. Camilleri had lost his eyesight between writing a draft in 2004-05 and finishing it almost twelve years later. He died in 2019. The book was published in Italian only the following year and in English in 2022.
This is a meta-fiction in another sense, a fiction that comes to us from beyond the boundaries of Camilleri’s life. We can still read and watch the lies of the characters and the truths they reveal – truths about ourselves, the readers and viewers, too. We identify with the misfits in the police station, their languorous movement from crime to resolution, revealing something about ourselves that we hadn’t grasped and will probably never live to feel, except vicariously through fiction.
So, Goodbye, Montalbano, and Goodbye, Camilleri.[1] We’ll miss you, though we’ll watch the Montalbano repeats and maybe crack the spines of the other novels once in a while.
[1] This “Goodbye” is a conscious allusion to another famous work of fiction. Camilleri tips his hat to the American writer Philip Roth, author of the novel Goodbye, Columbus and Camilleri’s close contemporary, who died in 2018. See page 108.