The Snack Thief (Inspector Montalbano Series #3) Book

Rating: 4* of five

Ambiguity is a highly valued and well-tolerated state in Italy. (Likewise Japan.) It makes so much of the insane, illogical world the Italians have created and laughingly called a "government" and a "social fabric" function, this ability to be more than one thing at one time.

Immigrants, seldom from high ambiguity-tolerant climes, screw things up mightily. Karima certainly does, that Tunisian house cleaner-cum-sex worker. She thinks she's moved to a place away from the stark complexities she comes from in Tunisia, and instead ends up at the center of an only-in-Sicily clusterfuck that had me fearing for Montalbano's life, sanity, and love relationship.

I don't fear for his waistline or his palate. Yet again, he swims and savors his way through the book. The food descriptions! *sigh* I wish I could eat Adelina the housekeeper's roulades of bream. I long for the koftas that the Mazarase chef reinvents after a visitation from the Virgin Mary while he was in prison. The sheer sensual glory of Camilleri's Sicily makes a hungry gourmand into a ravening beast. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste has not one thing on this series for sheer torture of the tastebuds.

In the end, Karima's story, which of course is so much larger than we first imagine it to be, resolves itself with losses and gains all around...death, of course, but also the slow, steady taking away that growing older in a life well lived requires us to accept and endure; the inevitable time-caused losses; but the surprises of joy and courage buoy up the other end of that cork in the wine-barrel of living emotion.

And really, in the end, isn't that what reading books is about? Experiencing living emotion, only at a safe remove; pre-feeling our feelings, or re-feeling them, in safety and without the need to explain or the desire to complain. Storytelling is, for this among many reasons, a brilliant use of language, no matter that the story told has been told before. Camilleri says as much, explicitly, on page 37: "There is no Sicilian woman alive, of any class, aristocrat or peasant, who, after her fiftieth birthday, isn't always expecting the worst. What kind of worst? Any, so long as it's the worst."

Word, as the kids of today used to say before we figured it out.