The Track of Sand

A classic Montalbano story, with all the essential ingredients: perfect Sicilian food, weather and scenery, organised crime, disorganised policemen, and slightly too many beautiful women trying to get into the Commissario's trousers. As usual, the dialogue is sharp and extremely funny, but there's always a darker undercurrent in the background as well.

This one starts out with Montalbano waking up from a nightmare to discover that someone really has beaten a horse to death on the beach outside his house during the night: unfortunately, the body vanishes whilst the cops are waiting for the espresso-maker to boil, leaving only a trail in the sand. There seems to be a connection with clandestine horse-racing organised by the mafia, but show more Montalbano also finds himself invited to a slightly surreal amateur race-meeting for amazzoni organised by an eccentric aristocrat. Camilleri (82 when this was published, but you wouldn't know it) is allowing Montalbano to start feeling his age a little (reading-glasses), and he also seems to be scattering plenty of allusions to Dante around, but I suspect that this is all part of the joke... show less

La vita se ne va

Bello tra i belli, perfetto e straziante, grottesco e surreale. Io mi perdo senza paura nelle descrizioni della natura, nei labirinti dell'anima di Salvù, nei dialoghi perfetti, nella poesia del suono musicale della parola. E' un tutt'uno senza confini il quotidiano vivere di Montalbano. Bellezza ed orrore, perfezione e discrasia, amore e distanza, violenza e gentilezza si rincorrono e si fondono. Non si lascia sfuggire nulla e di ogni istante sagoma un pezzo che diventerà parte del disegno finale. Ma il tempo passa e, come per ogni uomo, giungono implacabili piccoli segni del decadimento fisico. Imperlato di tristezza ma senza abbandonarvisi, restano piccole gemme di una vitalità sconvolgente da cogliere qua e là, show more maraviglioso Andrea Camilleri... show less

These are light but not cozy, intricate but not too convoluted, funny but not insulting. Salvo loves to eat and between Adelina his housekeeper and Enzo who runs the local trattoria, we are constantly being treated to gustatory temptations.

In this adventure, involving a dead horse, Salvo investigates (illegal) horse racing and its possible ties to the Mafia.  He has his house ransacked, goes through tremendous angst over growing old and slowing down, and finds himself dallying with the  sumptuous owner of the dead horse in an effort to prove himself still a good functioning Sicilian male.  He has to determine if the horse (who disappeared after the body was discovered) is in fact the Senora's missing steed, and what if any relation show more the horse murder has to do with his house being tossed.  And then he has to come to grips with his increasing need to wear reading glasses!!

The usual cast of characters is in evidence.  By now after reading 10 of these, I feel the gang is like family.  We know Mimi, and Catarello and Livia and Ingrid.  In fact in this one, Ingrid plays a much larger role than the long-suffering Livia. show less

By the twelfth book in this series, there's really not much new to say. Each slim volume is a perfect example of the translator's art, and each gives the reader a slice of Sicily in all its beauty, its ugliness, its humor, its despair, and-- last but not least-- its glorious food.

Montalbano's methods may be unorthodox, but he's a master of piecing things together and of evading his nitwit superiors so he can get the job done. He's got the perfect team to work with, and if it ever get dull, everyone in the station can rely on Catarella to liven things up. We also get to watch the inspector making a purchase in a local bookstore, a scene which every book (and crime fiction) lover will enjoy reading.

A recurring theme in these Montalbano show more books is his hatred of aging. In previous books, his whining about his advancing years got on my nerves a bit, but his complaints have mellowed, and I endure them and smile as I would with a friend. In The Track of Sand, Montalbano is dead set against wearing glasses, and Camilleri describes his brush with a mesmerizing woman so beautifully and tenderly that I could actually understand why a man might sometimes think of being unfaithful.

Camilleri is a master of the concise mystery that packs a punch. Like all the others in this series, The Track of Sand is filled with humor, delicious food, wonderful characters, and an interesting investigation. (Although I knew where Montalbano should be looking before he did, I still enjoyed watching his progress.) Each book is a delectable slice of Sicily, and I savor them all. show less

A very quick outing with Salvo Montalbano and the gang as he works to discover who brutally killed a race horse and left it on the beach near his home. Some actual detecting, a lot of good food, and some beautiful women to complicate Salvo's already fraught relationship with the (un)fair Livia made this one a lot of fun.

The previous two installments of the Inspector Montalbano books that I’ve read have been enjoyable despite seeming a little surreal, particularly when it comes to the local politics they depict. But as I read The Track of Sand while the Italian political system crumbled (again) in a heap on my TV screen I couldn’t help but be reminded of the old adage that truth is almost always stranger than fiction. In fact a book featuring a disappearing horse carcass, pathologically uncommunicative neighbouring police jurisdictions and a protagonist haunted by vaguely erotic dreams is positively tame in comparison the farce that is Silvio Berlusconi.

Montalbano wakes one morning to see a horse lying on the beach outside his front window. When he show more investigates he discovers the horse is dead, “its whole body bearing the signs of a long, ferocious beating” which makes Montalbano furious to the point of imagining he could do the same to the horse’s killers. He calls for his offsiders to come and help him collect evidence and review the crime scene so that they might track down the animal’s killers. Unfortunately the carcass disappears before the team has a chance to do everything they need to do and the investigation becomes somewhat haphazard. They do eventually learn that the horse is likely one (of two) kidnapped from the stables of a wealthy man and this introduces the beautiful Rachele Esterman, horse rider and seducer of men, to the picture.

I don’t imagine anyone reads this series purely for the plots. There always seems to be some woolly meanderings and illogical moments; here, for example, almost the entire mystery would have been avoided if only one of three supposedly intelligent and experienced policemen had taken a single photograph of the dead horse. There’s a rather clumsy link to another case too that seems to assume more knowledge than the reader of this book could have. But there is so much else to enjoy about the novels that it’s easy enough to let slide these relatively minor problems.

Montalbano’s fury on behalf of the poor horse and determination to locate the culprits, his obsession with finding good food (and his reaction when served stuff of lesser quality), his fear of getting older and his sporadically autocratic behaviour make him a well-rounded, if not always likeable character. His almost prudish reaction to his unorthodox seduction by the gorgeous Rachele is probably all too credible (because apparently the word no is not in his vocabulary). Though this was one of the things which prompted me to reflect on the disheartening depiction of women in this book and the series overall. On my limited exposure to one quarter of the series I can only remember women being seen as victims, his sexual partners or his cleaner. If he hasn’t slept with Ingrid then she’s the exception but there’s so much unresolved sexual tension between the two I’m not sure she can count as a fully formed character in her own right.

However, as always, the book is filled to the brim with rich humour, stemming mostly from the dialect-laden dialogue and Montalbano’s internal monologue. It reminds me how dolts like me who can only read in one language are indebted to translators with the skill of Stephen Sartarelli. The surreal exchange between Montalbano and the linguistically challenged Catarella when Rachele Esterman first appears in the story is, alone, worth reading the book for. This is a very readable and (in an age when bloated 500 page books appear to becoming ‘the norm’) delightfully short novel offering many moments of pure joy for the reader.

My rating 3.5 stars show less

Let me just say this: I love these books, I love the character of Montalbano and those of his quirky colleagues, and there will never be another series of novels like this one.

Montalbano's melancholic self reappears in this novel, number twelve in this most excellent and unique series of crime fiction, and oddly enough, it starts with a dream involving a very distorted Livia who turns into a sort of a horse. And even more oddly enough, when Montalbano wakes up, throws open the shutters and looks out the window onto the beach, there's a dead horse laying there. The horse had been brutally bludgeoned with an iron bar, and Montalbano determines that there were at least four culprits involved. He calls in his colleagues to take a look, and show more then City Hall to come and remove the carcass. But by the time the city people get there, the carcass has disappeared. It isn't long until a beautiful woman named Rachele Esterman comes to the station to file a report of a missing horse that had been in the Vigata stables of one Saverio Lo Duca, one of the richest men in Italy. The case is puzzling, but it's about to become even stranger, as Montalbano's home is broken into and ransacked. This case will send Montalbano into a surreal world of Italy's aging nobility, clandestine horse racing, a case involving the Mafia and even worse, the beautiful Rachele. And all the while, Montalbano is trying to get his relationship with Livia back on track, which at this point may be more difficult than solving this strange case.

Once again, Camilleri has given his readers a few hours of sheer reading delight, in which the old gang is still together, continuing to grow and change like people do in the real world. Montalbano is still concerned with getting older, especially now that Mimi Augello is sporting a new pair of glasses. We also get another insight into Montalbano's character with a lovely reflective set piece in which he remembers a fishing expedition with his uncle, and the unmatched taste of a fried sole. But he's still often amazed at the sheer absurdities of the system under which he lives and works, at television which conveys information "dressed up in details and circumstances that were either completely wrong, utterly false, or pure fantasy," and at the public for buying into it. Yet, this doesn't stop his appetite -- and although he manages to find some of the most unpalatable food in Sicily in this novel, what he gets from Enzo and Adelina more than make up for it. There are a few comical scenes, but as in the book just prior to this one, it seems that aside from the mystery at the heart of this book, Montalbano's more serious side is beginning to take center stage. And while sometimes the circumstances surrounding the crimes or their solutions might be a little murky or uneven, by book twelve everyone knows that you don't really read these books for the mystery elements -- they take on a life of their own. This book is no exception.

I can't end without a note about the translation by Stephen Sartarelli: I've said this before, but these books are so nicely rendered into English that sometimes I've forgotten that I'm reading a translation. I have appreciated the notes at the end of the books, which have been quite helpful and have helped to illuminate some situations in which an English translation may not have exactly fit. show less