My eighth book-review retrospective is The Scent of the Night, the sixth of a wonderful series of books by Andrea Camilleri. My full review can be read here.
"The strength of this book is the sense of place: the love that Montalbano has for his environment, his history and his way of life - and in this book, he is even showing signs of maturing in his relationship with long-term but permanently (it seems) absent girlfriend Livia, despite some unfortunate incidents with a sweater. He is enraged by progress, when progress is defined as covering the land with concrete, then abandoning it. There are beautiful little snapshots of this vanishing culture, for example when Montalbano discovers a remote shack where he eats a meal which he won't forget in a hurry. The police in Montalbano's team feature strongly in this outing also: Mimi's wedding traumas; Fazio's understanding and loyalty even when his boss has quite clearly strayed over the line of what is legal; and of course my favourite, the verbally challenged, overenthusiastic Caterella."
This question could apply to any of the Montalbano books: What do you think of the translation of Catarella's malaproposisms and dialect?
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Peter | 05 August 2008 at 06:15
IN answer to the previous post, I think Stephen Sartarelli does a pretty good job of translating Cateralla! Keeping in mind that Sicilian has a lot of vocabulary differences with "'Talian", which is imposssible to reproduce in English, I think the reader gets a good idea of how Cateralla talks from the translation.
Posted by: Sean | 08 August 2008 at 13:42