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This is a perfect gem of a book. Small in wordage, easy and fast to read, it is a delightful police procedural about crime in a small town in Sicily. The protagonist, Inspector Salvo Montalbano, is one of the most pleasant of fictional detectives that I've come across in a long time. Calm, efficient, understanding, he is not above tilting the regulations to obtain the greater end or to try to ensure that the innocent don't suffer. But tilting the regulations is what Sicily is all about, although not always for causes as worthy as Montalbano's. It's a land where who you know and who you are related to determine everything. It's also a land of multi-layered bureaucracy, as we see in mention of "the carabinieri, local police, intelligence services, special operations teams, coast guard, the highway police, railway police, and port police, the anti-Mafia, antiterrorism, antidrug, antitheft, and antikidnapping commissions, and others -- here omitted for the sake of brevity." And it's a land where when a powerful politician is found dead in his car with his pants down, everyone of importance gets on the phone to Inspector Montalban to pressure him into accepting a medical report of death by natural causes and closing the case at once. Pino and Saro, temporary "ecological agents" (trash collectors) find the body and think first to report to the politician who got them their jobs. But then they decide, no, "With Luparello dead, Cusumano's a nobody, a doormat." Next they decide to tell Rizzo, a lawyer who, although also an underling to Luparello, is in a good position to rise with Luparello's death. But Rizzo wants nothing to do with the matter: "So why are you telling me this?" he asks. A stunned Pino was ready for anything except that bizarre response. Pino had also discovered an extremely valuable necklace in the vicinity of the dead body, but he's telling no one about this part. Montalbano's girlfriend, Livia, is in Genoa, and, although he finds no lack of women to take her place in bed, Sicilian, Tunisian, or Swedish, among others, he keeps himself loyal to her. The daughter of Montalbano's old school chum is also in the police as a corporal, and he calls on her for investigative help. She lets him know that she's "Always at your service, night and day. At your beck and call, even, or if you like, at your whim." Later, disappointed that he's not interesting in the type of assistance she'd like to provide, she asks "Inspector, may I tell you something in all honesty?" "Of course." "You're an asshole." Following Montalbano's pursuit of the case, we are introduced to a remarkable vignette of Sicilian society from the highest to the lowest. The inhabitants of this historically much invaded and settled island have a subtle sense of propriety in their dealings with each other, knowing how far they can go and how far they can't. We meet Luparello's widow, an unusually understanding and practical woman; his son, who takes his death calmly; his nephew, broken up over the death of an uncle who acted in the place of a father; his political rival, a well-off doctor; the doctor's worthless son; the son's nymphomaniac Swedish wife; a prosperous pimp on very friendly terms with Montalbano; Montalbano's highly literate chief; and a good number of others who contribute to our greater understanding of Sicilian manners and mores. Camilleri writes with a light touch, illustrating his vision into the humor of life in all its manifold aspects. I disagree with the N.Y. Times review that found his humor to be "savagely funny" and provoking "sardonic laughter." Kirkus also called the book sardonic, but I disagree with them as well when they call Montalbano a "Latin re-creation of Philip Marlowe, working in a place that manages to be both more and less civilized than Chandler's Los Angeles," although I can see what they mean by the latter phrase. But to me the gentle-humored recounting of the story is more reminiscent of Norman Douglas's novel SOUTH WIND, which took place on another Italian island, Capri -- although Camilleri's language is less multisyllabic than Douglas's, the style has that good-natured charm full of grace notes and gentle understanding that human foibles are nonetheless human and therefore in their way even noble. THE SHAPE OF WATER is a clever interpretation of the mystery genre as sheer entertainment. Postscript: What is the shape of water? It has no shape of its own. It assumes the shape of whatever holds it.
Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, December 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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