La forma dell’acqua

La forma dell’acqua (The Shape of Water) is the first novel featuring Inspector Montalbano of Vigàta. Camilleri wrote it in 1994 and it was a real novelty, not only and not so much for its inventive language, but for the construction of the protagonist. Michele Serra wrote in 2014: ’In his debut scene in the world of the written page, Salvo Montalbano is not there. Or rather, he is there, but he is not among us. He is with himself. He is sleeping. And he is dreaming. Not an ordinary dream, either: an erotic dream, a passionate embrace with his Livia, who is both near and far. He is abruptly interrupted by a phone call from Brigadier Fazio. A man has died, a new case has been opened. Torn from himself, thrown out of bed, interrupted in the most intense and private of psychic states, the inspector curses as he tries to grab ‘not so much the receiver as the floating edges of the dream that was inexorably fading away’. It is the relentless metaphor of childbirth. A sudden and traumatic call to the world. From a protective womb – sleep, the female, the embrace – to one’s own destiny. Those fragments can no longer be sewn back together, that dream is interrupted forever. From that moment on, Salvo Montalbano belongs to us: he has been handed over by his author to readers and viewers. A novel that was like a revolution, and Montalbano, with his character, would achieve the much-coveted fusion of popularity and literature.