Customer Reviews

Excursion to Tindari (Inspector Montalbano Mysteries)

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Excursion to Tindari has some of the best humor based on human elimination since Rabelais. Who else but Andrea Camilleri would indulge his character development in such an imaginative and earthy way?

An ongoing theme in the book is the troubled nature of love between men and women. You will find the exposition to provide much room for chuckles and smiles.

The mysteries are subtle and puzzling . . . with the ultimate causal strings well hidden until near the end. Those who love challenging mysteries will feel well rewarded.

Ultimately, Excursion to Tindari is more character development about Inspector Montalbano than it is a mystery. But the book is much more mystery, if you look only at that dimension, than all but a few mysteries that will come out in any given year. As someone who loves great character development and difficult-to-solve mysteries, I was in heaven while reading this delightful book.

A young man is assassinated, professional-style, on his doorstep. He comes from a poor family and his work doesn't pay much. Where did he get all those expensive belongings?

An unfriendly elderly couple takes an excursion on a bus to Tindari, and don't even get off the bus until just before the trip ends. After that, no one can find them. What's going on?

A Mafia don tells Montalbano to call on him. Even with great caution, can Montalbano avoid being used for the don's purposes?

In the background, Montalbano is very upset to learn that Mimi Augello, his right hand man, has fallen in love with a policewoman in another town and is thinking about moving. Can anything be done?

The book has only three highlights for Montalbano: His favorite tree provides inspiration and answers; he has an unexpectedly pleasant meal with a beautiful and agreeable young woman; and he can always seem to find some wonderful food to distract him from his annoyances and frustrations.

The contrasts between the inner Montalbano and the public one are nicely and humorously drawn. As always, the politics of the police are displayed in Keystone-Kops-like ways. You could laugh about the funny parts of this book for days.

Bravo to both Andrea Camilleri and his brilliant translator, Stephen Sartarelli!

I usually enjoy reading crime novels about as much as I enjoy being burgled: not a lot. But watching the RAI's excellent adaptation (for Italian TV) screened on BBC Four recently made me curious enough to try the print original. And the book, of course, opens up dimensions beyond the scope of visual media.

Montalbano must be the only fictional sleuth who gets his intuitions from communing with 'saraceno' olive trees (ie those impossibly gnarled and knotty specimens pushing 1000 years old). He has an endearingly witty and bantering manner with his colleagues and an Italian's sensuous love of food: eating his baby octopi carefully enough to give the brain time to 'preactivate the senses of taste and smell so that one seemed to eat the fish twice'.

The author, Andrea Camilleri, is highly literary, but his allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, Pasolini etc. serve his purposes and never get in the way of his fast-paced plot, which twists unpredictably like that Saracen olive. Camilleri's own poetic turn of phrase, meanwhile, is just one of many facets that would make this book worth re-reading even after the mystery has been solved. Wonderfully inventive and entertaining!

I love these books. Camilleri writes with such a love of his characters and country and it oozes from every page. Montalbano is so real, a rough and ready cop, a fighter for human dignity and the old school way of doing things, butting up against nodern technology and corruption and taking it head on. In this book, an elderly couple go missing after an organized day trip and Montalbano is sent to investigate. Their seemingly ordinary lives start to unravel and Montalbano is there to pick up the pieces and restore order.

What more perfect place to read this wonderful outing for Inspector Montalbano than under the Sicilian sun? I could not quite manage that, but reading this book in the hills above Sorrento in southern Italy did not do my mood any harm.
Camilleri follows up his earlier books about the Vigata police with an equally assured and vivid account of two crimes. One is the murder of a young man, and the other concerns the disappearance of an elderly couple while on a trip to the titular historical site of Tindari. The connection is that the young man and the old couple all live in the same apartment building.
Montalbano investigates these crimes with his customary blend of detection and intuition, ably assisted by his wonderfully portrayed team. Each member would not make much of a stab at police work if left to his (they are all male) own devices: one colleague is too susceptible to the female form, another is barely literate apart from when it comes to computers, a third has little imagination. Yet when combined, the team works perfectly to follow up every lead.
EXCURSION TO TINDARI is an utterly convincing slice of Sicilian life: you can smell the sea and the fish; enjoy the wonderful meals in the restaurants; and smile at Motalbano's deft handling of the politics of the higher police echelons as well as of the Mafia. Yet the book is far from whimsical: it is written with great discipline and without any unnecessary prose. It slips down so smoothly that it is finished before you realise it, leaving you both satisfied and slightly melancholy to have finished the book.
The detective aspects of EXCURSION TO TINDARI are a slight stretch. Nene Sanfillipo, the young man who is killed, remains an enigma for slightly too long for the seasoned crime reader. The discovery of certain books and videos should have rung the correct alarm bell a bit quicker. And the excursion to Tindari taken by the old couple turns out to be a bit convoluted - villains are, I imagine, a bit more simple-minded in real life. But never mind, the book is just wonderful for its superb evocation of a way of life, its barbed cynicism about the prevailing political and social culture, and above all its sense of moral values. Events may not always end happily, but the decent thing is done, and that's enough for Montalbano and his trusty colleagues.

This is one of a series of excellent Motalbano books where the protagonist is just as interested (if not more so) in finding wonderful food than in solving the crime. Of course, he does both with aplomb. The writing evokes Sicily in all its many guises and the book was a joy to read.

This novel belongs to the Montalbano series. Comisar Montalbano is a policeman with a hunting instinct: when a case or a clue scratch his instict, he cannot give it up.

In this case, he has to work on two different cases: a young man killed in his doormat and the disappearance of a retired couple which had made a trip to Tindari.

As the research goes on, he is faced with darker and darker findings: the mafia, the fight among the different clans, the new computer-based crimes, the total lack of respect for human life and dignity.

The plot is not the best in the world (and the author doesn't need it either) but the atmosphere captures the reader from the beginning.

The good thing about Camilleri's novels (both Montalbano and the "historical" series)is that they are humorous, ironic, lighthearted, and at the same time bitter, rebel, unsatisfied. Montalbano and his men know that they cannot beat the mafia: it is too deeply engraved in Sicily, its politicians, institutions, in the people. But however they go on working for the sake of decent people, feeling a deep concern for innocence, justice - if only poetic- and truth. Montalbano, an ex rebel of year 68, whose political simpathy leans "neither right nor center" is not very liked by police authorities and has a peculiar love story with a genovese girl friend. He enjoys sicilian cooking, landscape and people. However, the author doesn't fall into italian folklorism.

Camilleri's novels are also a constant homage to his revered master Luigi Pirandello and all the good sicilian writers like his friend Sciascia.

Good read. Unputdownable.

(Translation of my Italian review for the original Italian text: La Gita a Tindari)

I realized with amazement, on closing this book, how beautiful it was.
Amazement, because I did not expect the experience... I thought I was going to read a standard detective story transposed onto a Sicilian setting, sort of "italianised", nothing more.

Camilleri instead elevates the genre to supreme art, creating little masterpieces in the process, gems of profound humanity and linguistic actuality, exciting, dynamic, real.
How can a writer, in his old age, be still so fresh and vital in producing texts of such absolute beauty?

Mr Camilleri's Montalbano is his vehicle for meditating on the universe Sicilian, rising it to universality with its cruelties and horrors, but also with its generosities and sympathies.

In this fifth episode, the timing is perfect and every facet presented to us in the plot has its place in the conceptual stage of Camilleri, between comedy and charm, where the main characters are skillfully interwoven with the marginal ones to form a fictitious reality that fascinates and sometimes moves, but often also makes you cringe, in baring its inner nudities too vividly and brutally, yet creating a narrative process that literally left me mesmerized.

Usual Montalbano genius but in this book the Kindle editing is so bad as to be distracting. It reads as if it's been done with voice type so instead of "a long weekend" you get "along weekend" and instead of "who're" (as in "who are") you get "whore". If it was a free or 99p edition I'd forgive it; as it is it's like the Hertz rental car I picked up in Italy today - an expensive wreck that needs serious maintenance.

I have read most of the books in this series and thoroughly enoyed every one, each has left me wanting more. Inspector Montalbano just grows on you - he is funny,quirky,compassionate,loves his food and has a complicated love life but is a good cop in a country that makes this very difficult.The story is well told and the writing is excellent you feel as if you were there in Sicily in the heat and dust. The rest of the characters all have their little quirks which makes you look forward to meeting them again and learning more about them.
In this tale an old couple go missing and the body of a young man who has been murdered is found,the plot makes it very hard to put the book down before you finish it, which leads to a lot of late nights.

My first book in the series, and I wish I had started earlier.
Snr Camilleri gives a fine sense of atmosphere and an entertaining cynicism.