Rounding the Mark - Andrea Camilleri
In this 2003 mystery, Sicilian police inspector Salvo Montalbano and his band of dedicated detectives return in this seventh book of the celebrated series.
This story opens with Salvo going through an existential crisis. He’s feeling his years. He’s concerned that his focus and concentration aren’t what they were, that he’s losing the powerful memory a detective needs. He ponders whether he should quit his job on the force.
In the middle of this brooding, he goes for a swim in the sea. Sure enough, what never happened to him before happens - he gets exhausted and has to clutch at a lucky plank to avoid drowning. While he is floating in the water, he collides with an unpleasant something: a body half decomposed. This suspends his desire to resign as he swings his attention to discovering who the “corpse that went swimming” was.
Camilleri's books often have a strong social consciousness, with an eye on inevitable socio-economic changes in Italian society, political upheaval, income inequality, and corruption. Here immigration is touched with a depth and a rawness that had never been done before in the series. Camilleri shows how xenophobic people can be, especially islanders with a mentality characterized by narrow-mindedness, ignorance of the mainland and the world, and outright hostility towards any outsider, even from a village five miles away.
As usual, Salvo is a sparrow that sprinkles drops of
water on a burning forest. These big issues hurt him because he hates injustice
and stupidity. That's why this installment in the series is so enjoyable. It’s full
of funny moments, which make the unpleasant somethings easier to take.
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