Customer Reviews

The Wings of the Sphinx (Library Edition)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
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Inspector Silvio Montalbano is feeling every one of his fifty-six years. In this eleventh installment in the Inspector Montalbano series, author Andrea Camilleri neither disappoints nor dazzles, instead turning in the journeyman performance expected. If anything, Montalbano, "meteoropathic" (he is profoundly influenced by the weather) inspector in Vigata, a fictional town in Siciliy, goes through his paces: his extravagant lunches at Enzo's, his tortuous conversations with Catarella, the desk sergeant who is the master of the malaprop, his walk to the end of the jetty to contemplate life, his whiskies on his veranda, his perplexing love-life with long time paramour Livia...it's all here. Yet fresh, nuanced.

Montalbano actually flees the scene of the crime that launches this book, the discovery of the body of a young woman, shot in the face and discarded in the city dump, naked. He can no longer deal with death visited upon the young. He is assailed, as are we all, with television's daily diet of death and dismemberment, war and violence visited on young and old. Montalbano still performs his amazing leaps of logic, his finely honed intuition often delivering the necessary bridge needed to solve a crime or determine a motive, yet in this book he leaves much of the work to his more-than-capable assistants, Mimi Augello and Fazio. His investigation wanders through a Catholic charity, private homes, the remains of a burned-out retail business, and prison.

As always, Camilleri creates a sense of place and sets it firmly in time. Through Montalbano he takes his obligatory swipes at Silvio Berlusconi, the web of the powerful who seem to trample through every investigation, and the Sicilian bureaucracy,

While the series isn't great literature, it is a great series. Camilleri keeps his characters fresh, building on them in each subsequent work. You feel what Montalbano feels, the frustration, the powerlessness, the emotions of growing older and wiser but no less effective against the powers that be.

When we visited Italy a couple of years ago I wanted to purchase the first book in the series, The Shape of Water (La forma dell' acqua) in Italian. When I walked into a bookstore in Rome and asked for the title, the clerk beamed and shouted "Mafia! Mafia!" Camilleri's a well-known and respected writer in Italy, with the series turned into a television program.

I pounce on any new Montalbano mystery, and have to fight my husband to keep possession. Every book is a treat. The setting is Sicily, where we expect plenty of scandals and skullduggery - and Camilleri delivers.

In this book, Inspector Montalbano at 56 is having a crisis with his long-distance girlfriend Livia, while carrying on his usual lifestyle. He's consuming huge quantities of fabulous Sicilian food, making obscene wisecracks to superiors and stowing half-smoked cigarettes in his burnt-out jacket pocket. He's also digging too deeply into a case that's sure to bring trouble.

A twenty-something woman has been found naked in an illegal dump with her face shot off. The main clue to her identity is the Sphinx moth tattooed on her shoulder blade. Montalbano eventually connects the victim, who is Russian, to an association called Benevolence that help young women imported from other countries escape prostitution. Montalbano suspects that Benevolence is hiding bad things behind a good cause.

This is a political hot potato, since Benevolence naturally enough has attracted a lot of support from powerful people.

But it's not so much the crimes and their solutions that make Camilleri great fun to read. It's the wacky atmosphere in the police station, with Montalbano at war with the system and his desk sergeant Catarella garbling every phone message and mangling every name. And it's the drama and colorful language that seem to surround every human interaction.

Montalbano covers a lot of ground in his investigations, despite the fact that the government can't afford gasoline for the squad cars. Camilleri delights in portraying scandalous goings-on in Sicily.

Montalbano fans who like to reconstruct the inspector's favorite dishes will find detailed and daunting instructions for making 'mpanata di maiali on page 159.

I'd suggest that the Montalbano mysteries be consumed entire and in order for the fullest enjoyment.

Inspector Salvo Montalbano knows his territory--the Sicilian town of Vigata and environs--like the back of his hand, so when criminal activity occurs, he usually has some idea of who might be involved and why. In "The Wings of the Sphinx," another "slaughter of the innocent" has occurred--a beautiful young woman has been shot and her body discarded on a garbage heap. The increasingly world-weary Montalbano finds the crime almost more than he can stomach and starts again to consider retirement from the police. His dark mood is amplified by a crisis in his relationship with long-time girlfriend Livia--a relationship that has been demanding some kind of definition for some time.

Eventually, Montalbano sorts through the professional challenges, uncovering some of the usual venal conspiring amongst leaders of the community, as well as more banal personal failings by the town's lesser lights. As always, author Camilleri gives the reader an insightful exposition of the good and bad in his native Sicily, but manages to end his story on the positive side of the human ledger. Along the way, there is plenty of cynicism, bombast, humor, serious dining on Sicilian cuisine and an inventive and serpentine story line.

Great reading. Bring on the next one.

This is high octane, grand cru Camilleri. For those of you who read my damning 1 star review of the highly unsatisfactory 'August Heat', I personally in person urge you to order this one immediately. It's a sound storyline, full of the essential twists & turns, but also full of fun, humour and iron. Geddit!

I've always wanted to read a dectective series in sequence, non-stop. I got Lucky & found Andrea Camilleri. I had read some starred reviews of The Wings of the Sphinx and saw it was the eleventh one. So I picked up The Shape of Water a few weeks ago and just now finished. WHAT A GREAT RUN!

The inspector cursed the saints. The police stations had no gasoline, the courts had no paper, the hospitals had no thermometers, and meanwhile the goverment was thinking about building bridge to nowhere. But there was always plenty of gasoline for the useless ecorts of ministers, undersecretaries, committee chairmen, senators, chamber deputies, regional deputies, cabinet cheifs, and underassistant briefcase carriers...

This about sums up privatized governments worldwide and on about page four, as engines begin revving up in Montalbano's latest mystery.

Camilleri descriptions speak for themselves/In the door way appeared a short man of about seventy with a face so red it looked like a ripe tomato, and beady eyes buried in all the fat/or/a fortyish redhead who measured barely four feet eight inches tall. He had extremely long arms and bowed legs. He looked like a monkey. Surely Darwin, if he could have seen him, would have hugged him for joy/or/the moment we make a move on a case, we always run into a parliamentary deputy, priest, politico, or mafioso, who then form a daisy chain to protect the person likely to be under investigation/or/I'll give you four days and not one day more... And what if it's not enough?... You'll have to make do. And, during these four days, I advise you to proceed with extreme caution... Don't worry, I won't spare the vasoline/or/Don Quixote thought windmills were monsters, whereas what we're dealing with really are monsters, but they pretend to be windmills.

Consider yourselves lucky if you haven't tasted An Inspector Montalbano mystery.

They are a delight. To me, there were the Raymond Chandler mysteries of the 30s, 40s, & 50s. Then, there was the Richard Condon books of the 60s thru the 90s. Today, there is Andrea Camilleri.

So, reader

...are you feeling lucky?

Probably since book three, these books are not about solving mysteries, but enjoying Salvo Montalbano's look on life. He's just as cynical as Michael Dibdin's Zen or Donna Leon's Brunetti, but he has a totally different way of looking at life in Italy (well actually Sicily, which isn't truly Italian). While Zen is always looking at the dark side, and Brunetti is more philosophical in his Venetian bastion, Montalbano lives life openly an without apology.

But at 56 the Inspector is beginning to feel that the sands are running out in the hourglass (terrible cliche, but true) and he wants to have more 'substance' to his life. He may complain about Mimi constantly being away from work because of his 'little one' but in ways he is jealous of him. He knows he doesn't want to be alone at the end of his life, but he can't come to a conclusion of how to hold onto Livia without changing his lifestyle.

In the side story of a faked kidnapping, we see Salvo judging the man who ran off with his mistress for a vacation, while his wife was up in arms that the Police were doing nothing to find him. In the main story we have four Russian girls (all with sphinx moth tattoos on the left shoulder blade), who in one way or another are mixed up in something illicit due to being in love or being loved.

Montalbano, who is the only brain in the whole book, enjoys baiting his superiors, belittling his co-workers and sating his appetite as much as any glutton. Every one else in the book is there to be used by Salvo, to either perpetuate the story or give him some one to mock. But it seems that this is all becoming stale and Salvo wants more permanence in his life. One wonders if this has anything to do with the ninety year old author!

I'm looking forward to the translations of the next three books, and hopefully at some point Camilleri will retire our Inspector, so that the series will have a 'real' ending and not just an end.

Zeb Kantrowitz

"The Wings Of The Sphinx," takes the reader into familiar territory: Vigata,and the peculiarities of Sicilian (Italian)law and order. Author Andrea Camilleri, through his marvelous creation, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, explores some of these "peculiarities.'

When the body of a young woman, with a distinct tatoo is discovered, it launches Montalbano on an investigation that will lead him into a shadowy world of exploited Russian women, and their managers. Interwoven with the Russians are the machinations

of a benevolent society set up to rescue (or is it to exploit?)immigrant women headed for the flesh trade.

Montalbano's efforts are not aided by the fact that the society has "friends in high places." The highest levels of both Church, and Government seem bent on thwarting his efforts to solve the murder, and restore moral order in his portion of the universe.

All of this plays against the backdrop of Montalbano's own midlife uncertainties, and, as ever, his tumultuous relationship with Livia. She has been the love of his life for more than fifteen years. Now, as the story begins, they haven't spoken for weeks.

Montalbano broods over the possibility that the rift created by their last fight is so wide that it may be beyond healing. At fifty-six he wonders if his life has counted for anything! In short the same themes he has been dealing with for some time.

This book is like getting a phone call from an old friend who, in his late night call, pours out his, or her deepest doubts. Then, by conversation's end reassures his, or her, self, and us, that there is a moral order, and purpose to life. If one will have the courage to stay faithful to one's own vision of right and wrong--justice will win out.

This is a good read. A welcome visit with a protagonist who is, by now an old friend.

"Wings..." was my first Montalbano mystery and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It`s wonderfully entertaining, and not because of any action-packed hysteria, save-the-world hystrionics or normal-folks-turn-superheroes-a-la-Dan-Brown. Its rather a mystery novel worth savoring for the characters, for the ambience, for the discription of the meals and life in quaint, charming Sicily. The actual murder is clever, but is sort of quickly solved through common sense detective work rather than CSI-type brilliance. I highly recommend this book for readers who enjoy well-written police procedurals that tell elegantly plotted yet plausible yarns.

I am thrilled to have found the Inspector Montalbano series. The writing is excellent and the characters well-developed. Great brain-candy!

Pretty much the same old same old Montalbano stories of the detective, his men, & his love of food. Good, quick, enjoyable read.