Hunting Season by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli
This novel was one I picked up because I enjoyed the author's Inspector Montalbano mystery series. It is nothing like that series. It is a mystery, but also a farce, with touches of romance, and nods to several of Shakespeare's Italian plays. It also rambles a lot and I found I didn't really care about it enough to try to follow all the plot strings.
There are many interwoven plots for such a short novel, but the central one has a man returning to the town of Vigata under an assumed name after being away for years. He escaped after his father was murdered, and has an agenda that it takes some time to reveal. The local nobility, the marchese, is a womanizer who ignores his daughter while trying to produce an heir, with most of the local inhabitants turning a blind eye.
Some reviews called this bawdy and humorous, but it felt contrived and hard to follow to me, and I found the female characters to be pawns with no real choices.
I finished it because I was reading it for one of my reading challenge goals, but wouldn't recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment