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Translated by Stephen Sartarelli
Pan Macmillan Australia, This edition Aug 2006
Reviewed by Sunnie Gill
Inspector Montalbano is mightily cheesed off. His dislike of the current
government has been heightened by the revelation that they ordered that
evidence be fabricated against a group of political protesters in order to
justify their detention. The fact that the high-ups in the police went
along with it is the last straw. Montalbano has decided he’s going to quit
the police.
However, while having a swim in the sea to mull things over and relax a
little, Montalbano accidentally bumps into another body. After apologising
and receiving no reply, he discovers much to his horror that the body is a
corpse. The death of the unidentified man is later put down to accidental
drowning.
To cap off his week, he is called out when yet another boatload of illegal
immigrants lands on Sicily’s shores. While reluctantly assisting in the
rounding up of the newly arrived immigrants, Montalbano notices that a
little African boy has broken away from his family and has run off. He
gives chase and finds the boy cowering, terrified behind some barrels. He
takes the boy by the hand and leads him back to his mother. But later on,
after reflection, something about the boy’s demeanour and his apparent
terror seems to be out of proportion to the situation.
When the boy’s body is found a few days later, the victim of what seems to
be a hit and run accident, Montalbano feels guilty that perhaps his
actions in returning the boy have somehow contributed to his death. The
fact that the boy has been found in the same isolated area as the drowned
man strikes Montalbano as being more than an unhappy coincidence and he
takes it upon himself to investigate.
ROUNDING THE MARK is Andrea Camilleri’s seventh Inspector Montalbano novel
and not for nothing is he currently Italy’s most successful author. The
fact that Camilleri was in his seventies before creating the irascible
inspector is even more remarkable.
ROUNDING THE MARK is my first encounter with Inspector Montalbano and
associates. I loved the sly, slightly macabre humour injected into the
story. The description of the inspector swimming into the body and how he
goes about towing it to the shore had me giggling to myself.
By no stretch of the imagination could you call Salvo Montalbano a
loveable character, but his grouchiness and his quirks do have an
endearing quality to them. You can’t help but like him. His work
colleagues too have their own individual personalities. Fazio, who is
almost as grumpy and outspoken as Montalbano, the loyal Mimi Augello, and
of course where would they be without Catarella? Catarella is incapable of
opening a door without slamming it into a wall. He can never remember
names and he always gets phone messages wrong. And finally there is the
unseen Toretta who always seems to have what’s needed: from a spare pair
of spectacles to rubber hip-high wading boots. (In fact the Inspector
remains to be convinced that Toretta hasn’t set up an emporium in his
office).
The success of a book written in a language other than English often
hinges on the work of the translator. ROUNDING THE MARK has been
translated into English by Stephen Sartarelli. One of the most challenging
tasks for translators must be how to convey to the reader a sense of a
character by his accent or dialect. Sartarelli has managed this deftly by
giving the character of Catarella an almost Brooklyn accent and has also
avoided any hint of pomposity or long-windedness which often sneaks into
translated books.
The end result is a nicely complex tale populated with three dimensional
characters, each with their own individual personality traits. Andrea
Camilleri is another author I shall definitely be reading again.
Oct 2006 Review originally published on Murder & Mayhem
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