The Safety Net

I rate this as one of the most enjoyable Montalbanos. It has all the usual elements of Camilleri’s Montalbano formula:

(1) Montalbano’s quirky personality.

(2) The interplay between him and his team.

(3) Lots of humour.

(4) The occasional critical social comment from Camilleri’s left-leaning perspective.

In the TV version we also get:

(5) The beautiful Sicilian scenery.

I’m a great fan of Montalbano, but not an uncritical one. A couple of Camilleri’s books have felt like he was going through the motions; a couple have contained themes or scenes which were too dark or distasteful for my liking; and a couple have contained irritating paranormal incidents. But there was nothing that spoiled this one for me.

There are two strands to the show more plot, and both of them are unusual and intriguing. I really wanted to read on and on. Like in a couple of his other books, one of the strands involves events going back decades. And Camilleri has some interesting things to say about our smartphone-addicted society. But I’m not going to spoil things by saying anything else about the plot.

Escape for a while to Montalbano’s world!

PS:

I'm adding a postscript after reading an interesting point made by another reviewer. That reviewer is not happy about the accents that translator Stephen Sartarelli gives to Catarella and Adelina.

When I read a Montalbano novel for the first time several years ago, I too felt doubtful about those accents. I thought at first that Sartarella was using the sort of corny, stereotyped language that writers often condescendingly put into the mouths of working class characters.

But I soon realised that this was not the case. What Sartarelli is actually doing is carrying out the difficult task of translating Camilleri’s original Italian editions, in which:

(1) Adelina’s Italian is of a rough and ready working class type, with lots of grammatical errors.

(2) Both Adelina and Catarella use a lot of Sicilian dialect. (I’ve had a go at reading some stories in the original Italian, and Camilleri’s use of Sicilian dialect makes them difficult.)

(3) Catarella is a clownish character whose linguistic confusion is used for comic effect.

So Sartarelli is actually making a good job of a difficult task. Once you get tuned into it, this language adds to the humour – unless Catarella-ish humour doesn’t appeal to you, of course. show less

By this time (book 25 of 28 in the series), I feel as though Salvo Montalbano is a beloved uncle, and The Safety Net brings this wily curmudgeon into the world of teenagers and social media. It also brings him into a situation all too familiar to Americans-- gun violence in schools.

With his trademark humor, Andrea Camilleri sets us down in a town seething with excitement over the presence of a film crew in its midst. Some of the situations Montalbano and his team have to deal with are quite funny. But Camillleri can be quite serious, too.

The author shares his opinions about gun violence in schools as well as what he thinks about the internet and social media. ("How was it possible... that this vast new realm had only created a show more multitude of loners...?") And Montalbano shines when dealing with teenagers in this story. He starts out believing that he doesn't even come close to speaking the same language as the youngsters, but once he begins to apply himself to the task, he's better at it than he'd imagined. And-- wonder of wonders-- he even sits down with Catarella to do some work on the computer!

I've loved this series for a good long time. I love the setting, the food, the humor. The mystery of the home movies here in The Safety Net is a good one as well. But what I really love is Salvo Montalbano, a man so particular about his food that, if you invite him to dinner and he makes an excuse not to come, you know you're a bad cook. I hate to see my time with this series getting nearer to the end. show less

A Swedish film-crew have taken over the town of Vigata to make a fifties costume-drama, which leads to the welcome return of Ingrid, the Swedish rally driver we met in some of the early novels, now acting as translator and community-liaison for the film people. But of course the town is all at sixes and sevens, Montalbano's favourite restaurant is full of noisy foreigners, Mimì Augello has embarrassingly been caught taking a moonlit boat-trip with the Swedish leading lady, and worse, the general disruption seems to have caused a suspension of all normal criminal activity, leaving the police bored and frustrated. Montalbano resorts to working on his backlog of paperwork, and even sets out to investigate a minor oddity the Borough show more Engineer has discovered in his father's collection of Super-8 films, a puzzle that none but the most habituated of crime-novel addicts could possibly imagine has any connection with violent death. (We know better, of course...)

Then, some 150 pages into the book, when we have made our minds up that nothing is going to happen at all and Montalbano has made the supreme sacrifice and got on a plane to the North to visit his girlfriend, all hell breaks loose. There's been a shooting in a school in Vigata. To track down those responsible, Montalbano has to delve into the murky world of blogghi, tuiti, and fessibuc. Even with Catarella by his side to translate American into Sicilian, we can tell it's not going to end well...

Camilleri tells us in a note that this is the first novel he's dictated rather than writing it himself, and that perhaps accounts for the rather rambling structure and the absence of much real mystery in the solutions to either of the two plotlines. But there are still plenty of nice jokes, a few sharp moral observations, lots of good food, and rather more Sicilian dialect than they would have got away with earlier in the series.

Not for newcomers to Montalbano, but addicts will find plenty to keep them happy. show less

Montalbano Disrupted
Review of the Penguin Books paperback (March 2020) English language translation of the Italian language original [book:La rete di protezione|34506537] (2017)

Commissario Montalbano's daily routine in Vigàta, Sicily is disrupted when a Swedish film crew takes over the town to film a romantic comedy TV movie about a Swedish/Sicilian love relationship. The town's store facades are converted back several decades, streets and locations are shut down and even the main room of Montalbano's favourite lunch spot is swarming daily with noisy film crews.

Fortunately two cases come along to divert Montalbano's attention in the meantime, one a seemingly inexplicable mystery based on archival Super 8 films and the other a possible show more terrorist act at a local school. The regular cast is all in place and hit their lines perfectly, the bumbling receptionist Cat, the faithful Fazio and the wily Mimi. Montalbano even manages a quick trip to Genoa to visit love-of-his-life Livia while puzzling over the cases. The significance of the book's title doesn't become apparent until the very end.

Although his eye sight was failing when he dictated this book in 2015, Camilleri (1925-2019) showed no drop off in quality. Due to the delays of publication and translation, we still have 3 more Montalbano adventures [book:Il metodo Catalanotti|39988328] (planned English title The Sicilian Method) (2018), [book:Il cuoco dell'Alcyon|45187054] (The Cook of Alcyon) (2019) and Riccardino (2020? not yet published in Italian) to look forward to in English. show less

The Chief Inspector Salvo Montalbano’s fictional town of Vigàta has been turned upside down by an international movie crew filming in the Sicilian town; however, neither of the two mysteries in this, the 25th novel in this exceptional series, has anything to do with that.

Montalbano finds himself looking into two very different events: a set of six ancient home movies filmed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by a long-dead man and the appearance of two gun-toting men in a classroom of 13-year-old boys. To give away much more or to reveal the meaning of the title would be to spoil the fun. Let’s just say there are memories and remorse aplenty mixed up with the mysteries. And now that author Andrea Camillieri is dead, every Montalbano show more novel — like the exquisite treats they are — must be savored without anyone spoiling this delightful morsel.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received this book from NetGalley and Penguin Books in exchange for an honest review. show less

Chief Inspector Montalbano is about to be seriously inconvenienced when a film crew arrives in town to make a television series set in the 1950s. The townspeople are asked to see if they have any momentos from that time and an engineer finds some old film that his father had taken every year on the same date between 1958 and 1963: a film showing the wall of an old barn. Intrigued, Montalbano starts to look into the matter, but he is distracted when a pair of gunmen threaten a classroom full of young teenagers, including Mimi’s young son. How these investigations are connected, and what he learns from them, will come to surprise Montalbano once again….”The Safety Net” is the 25th and, alas, the last of the Montalbano series; show more Camilleri died a few years ago, but the English translation of this final novel just came out in 2020. As ever, Montalbano is more or less stumbling in the dark until, suddenly, he isn’t; and his faithful team trusts that he knows what he’s doing even if he is sure he does not. And food, of course, is at the heart of the story, or at least helps to supply its soul. I suppose one could read this book without having read any of the rest of the series, but this is a series where starting at the beginning is really worth doing. And someone new to reading Camilleri will have the joy of knowing there are fully 25 of these books (along with some novellas) ahead of them (I’m already jealous)! Recommended! show less

We flew through this one. Couldn't put it down. An unusual mystery for Montalbano. We love the Montalbano series and were delighted to find such originality in this plot. Very different and very satisfying. All the usual suspects with lots of laughs and great food! Highly recommend!