Customer Reviews

Il Cane Di Terracotta (Memoria) (Italian Edition)

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This would have to be one of Camilleri's best efforts.

A mafia "supergrass" is ambushed before he can testify. As he lies dying in a Palermo hospital, he has his revenge by telling Salvatore Montalbano, the police chief of Vigàta about a mafia arms cache that has been hidden in a cave.

But behind the cache, there is a second room with the naked corpses of two young lovers. A huge clay dog looks over the corpses and there is a bowl of old coins and a pitcher of water nearby. The bodies are very old, dating back to the American WWII landing in Sicily and Montalbano is sidetracked into a private investigation into events that happened over half a century ago.

This book is really, really terrific. Camilleri has a degree of love and compassion for his characters sadly lacking in most modern crime writers. I personally lost all interest in James Elroy after coming across Camilleri's books. The insights one gains into small town Sicilian police and their "cohabitation" with the local mafia are quite interesting as well.

There is a small(?) problem with this book, however.

The first is that you will need to either be a very fluent Italian speaker or better still, be familiar with the Sicilian dialect.

Camilleri sets his books in a fictional town called Vigàta, and writes (even the narrative) in a sort of generic, modern day Sicilian of his own invention, the dialect of Vigàta. The language flows in a wonderful way, with a soft-spoken musicality which is not possible in other languages and helps to set the tone and the atmosphere of the story.

Camilleri is not TERRIBLY difficult to understand, no worse than "A Clockwork Orange", and you can probably work out a lot of the words from context alone, but it is certainly a daunting task if you're not a fluent Italian speaker.

If you CAN read Italian, do yourself a favour and try to find a copy of this book. It's certainly worth the effort.

I had not read a book in Italian for ages, and I found Camilleri's books about Montalbano just great. Now I am trying the other books from the same author. I agree with Vince in stating that everyone should read these books. However, even if I found them hard at first, due to the dialect the author uses, I strongly recommend the original version. If you are able ti find a translated copy don't buy it. The Siculo language is part of the book. And I can't figure Salvo Montalbano speaking English or any other language than Italo-siculo.

Andrea Camilleri is a Sicilian-born writer (and film director), famous for his series of crime novels featuring Inspector Montalbano, a Sicilian detective from the fictitious city of Vigàta. Il Cane di Terracotta is the second book in the series. I picked the first book (La Forma dell'Acqua) last year, during a visit to Italy, and despite my mediocre reading skills in Italian, I liked it very much. On another visit to Naples earlier this year, I picked up Il Cane.

The book starts off with a well known mafia boss who decides to call it a day and turns himself in to Montalbano (who agrees to stage his arrest to make the retirement respectable). The mafia boss has information that helps the police solve a theft case involving a supermarket delivery truck, and leads them to a cave used by the mafia as an arms stash.

So far, a typical mafia crime story. But Montalbano notices the cave has a sealed secret passage that leads to a second, smaller cave. In the inner cave he he finds the bodies of a young couple, together with a statue of a terracotta dog, a bowl of water and some coins dating back to the second world war. The bodies and the objects are arranged in what appears to be a ritualistic burial setting.

This finding intrigues Montalbano, even though it is clear, fifty years since the crime was perpetrated, that whoever killed the young lovers is long dead, or at least very old. He embarks on a journey to discover why they were killed and placed in the cave. This journey is the real heart of this book, and makes the inspector learn about old traditions and buried secrets.

Reading Camilleri is not easy, given that many of the dialogues are in Sicilian dialect. Here is an example of a short exchange between Montalbano and his housemaid Adelina, who is worried about his eating habits and hygiene (p. 362):

"Vossia non mangiò ne aieri a mezzujorno né aieri sira!"

"Non avevo pititto, Adelì"

"Io m'ammazzo di travaglio a fàrricci cose `nguliate e vossia le sdegna!"

"Non le sdegno, ma te l'ho detto: mi faglia il pititto"

"E po' chista casa diventò un purcile! Vossia `un voli ca lavo `n terra, `un voli ca lavo I robbi! Havi cinco jorna ca si teno la stissa cammisa e li stessi mutanni! Vossia feti!"

So aside from the many words I either need to look up, or guess from the context, there is also this continuous guesswork about the Italian equivalent of the Sicilian slang. Some are easy (aieri = ieri; sira = serra), but others are not so self-evident (took me a second to realise mutanni were mutande). And yet, discovering this special dialect through the machinations of Montalbano adds to the pleasure of reading.