Scott Pilgrim, Inspector Montalbano, The Jewel in the Crown
Couple of reviews. I also read Making Money, but it turns out I'm too distressed by the Alzheimer's thing to write a review, and anyway it's exactly like you expect, which is fine.
( Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together )
( Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together )
the most immediate feature of the originals, which is that about one word per line isn't really in
the same language as the rest of the book. For the benefit of people other than inky
reading this, here's a web page produced by Italian fans of the series containing a glossary
of non-standard words used in both descriptions and dialogue in these books:
http://www.vigata.org/dizionario/camilleri_linguaggio.html - and I'm told by people
who know these things better than I do that this stuff is a mixture of real Sicilian
and stuff the author seems to have made up. (But then one _would_ expect Vigata to have
its own dialect like other Sicilian towns do, so since Vigata isn't a real place
it should have some words no real Sicilian town does, maybe.) It's not as hard to
read as you might think: you can usually tell from context what a word probably means,
and the commoner ones come round again and again. It's only some of the dialogue
involving some suspects (and the policeman Catarella) that I find I need help with,
and even there I can generally tell what _kind_ of thing is going on, or I like to kid
myself that I can.
Of course, I can't really see how this COULD have been conveyed in English other than by,
say, having all the Sicilianisms replaced by Glaswegian slang or something, which would have
seemed a bit odd. (Though I gather the translations in some other languages have indeed
used the slang/dialect of some particular region of Norway, France or whatever.)
14 made-for-TV movies of Montalbano exist, and can be seen online at http://www.raiclicktv.it/raiclickpc/secure/folder.srv?id=1833
There's a lot less Sicilian in these than in the books.
They're only available with English subtitles on Region 4 DVDs (Australia/NZ).
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