As I was listening, I became surprised at my own words. “I’ve lost my eyesight and therefore had no choice but to ask my friend Valentina to read it to me aloud. “After turning 91 and feeling surprised at still being alive and still wanting to keep writing, I thought it might be a good idea to ‘adjust’ the story of Riccardino,” he adds. I regret this, but at 80 years of age, one cannot avoid the fact that many, too many, things must come to an end.”Įleven years later, in November 2016, he revisited the unpublished work. In an author’s note written in 2005 and included with the book, Camilleri wrote: “This is the final novel with Inspector Montalbano as its protagonist. This mystery is a big hodgepodge that reads like it was written by a beginner.’” You are putting far too many contradictory elements into play and keeping them all on the same level, so that the reader gets lost in the confusion.

“‘Do you really mean that?’ ‘I really mean it. It’s a pile of horseshit that doesn’t hold together,” the Author tells Montalbano. “You’re making me write a shitty novel about the story of Riccardino. Metafictional and fourth-wall-breaking, it features interventions from “the Author” as Montalbano puzzles his way to the solution, with Camilleri clearly having a great deal of fun along the way. The English-language edition was translated by Stephen Sartarelli, and sees the Inspector investigating the murder in broad daylight of a man called Riccardino who had called him that morning. Camilleri died in 2019, and Riccardino, the 28th and final novel in the Montalbano series, was published in Italy in 2020.

The sicilian method montalbano