Sicilian Elements in Andrea Camilleri's Narrative Language: A Linguistic Analysis

While many scholars as well as readers of Camilleri's work agree that the Sicilian author's multifaceted and at times complex language is at least partially responsible for his enormous success, Cinzia Russo's 2021 book is the first comprehensive linguistic study of his work that has been published in English. Moreover, as Russo explains in her introduction, linguistic studies to date have mainly concentrated on the qualitative analysis of the lexical components of Camilleri's Sicilian and are also mainly limited to his earlier production (xiv−xv). She here tries to bridge this scholarly gap, examining novels from the author's entire production span. Her three stated research aims are to investigate whether the usage of dialect differs between the historical novels and the Montalbano novels, to measure whether the occurrence of Sicilian has increased over time in Camilleri's works, and to investigate whether and how the occurrences of dialect can be ascribed functional value (xxi−xxii).Russo's comparison centers around five novels in Camilleri's production, which she examines in detail. She starts with his debut novel, Il Corso delle cose, which she sees as his search for a writing style that would satisfy him later on (3–5). She then passes to his first historical novel, Un filo di fumo, as an example of the first phase of his narrative language (31) and proceeds to his Montalbano debut, La forma dell'acqua, which marks his entrance into popular culture (61). The analyses of these three novels close the section of her book called Part I: The Dawn. Part II: The Twilight makes a large leap in Camilleri's career and focuses on the last two novels that the author wrote without the help of his trusted assistant Valentina Alferj. As explained in note 15 to her introduction, Russo wanted to exclude from this study the works she could not be completely sure were written without possible linguistical interference from Camilleri's assistant (xxxiv). The works investigated in this section are the historical novel La banda Sacco and the Montalbano mystery La giostra degli scambi. Part III: Trends of Evolution is more thematic. In this section, Russo looks at Camilleri's use of Sicilian proverbs and phrases, and his use of dialect when mentioning food and when talking about specific recurring items in Montalbano's realm (women, feelings and behaviors, the awakenings that open the novels, and the inspector's intuitions). This section helps to fill in the gap of Camilleri's production that the intensive analysis of the works written in 1968 (Corso), 1980 (Filo), 1994 (Forma), 2013 (Banda), and 2015 (Giostra) did not cover.In analyzing five complete novels as well as important excerpts from many others, Russo obviously had to limit the scope of her investigation quite drastically and make a “rigorous selection from the full array of the distinctive structural features of Sicilian,” as she herself points out (xxiv−xxv). She focuses her research on linguistical (phonetic/phonological) and grammatical (morphological/morphosyntactic) features as well as three items of the Sicilian lexicon: authentic Sicilian items, items that are likely to be recognized outside of Sicily, authentic Sicilian lexicon favored regularly by Camilleri from early on which acquires a fixed status (xxv−xxvii). In her introduction, she warns that she makes “no attempt whatsoever at interpreting (or even speculating about) Camilleri's intervention as an ‘author’” and that she plans on carrying out a “descriptive, objective linguistic analysis” (xxxi).The book is, as promised, factual, and will appeal more to the linguistic scholar—the target reader of this book—rather than the casual reader of Andrea Camilleri's literature. The care with which Russo has assembled her evidence is apparent: through comprehensive lists, tables, and in long citations, she painstakingly manifests the change and evolution of Camilleri's use of Sicilian. By occasionally interspersing interesting hypotheses (e.g., “The fact that the characters displaying the higher concentration of Sicilian (structural) features are middle-aged/older women may lead us to posit that, in Forma, gender and age are in fact operative sociolinguistic parameters for the distribution of Sicilian”; 70), Russo keeps up the reader's interest.Russo's conclusions are partially surprising. Interestingly, she shows that the use of Sicilian does not differ greatly between Camilleri's historical novels and his Montalbano production. She finds that in his early works “there are very comparable distribution patterns of Sicilian structural features both in terms of number and types of features and in terms of their overall incidence; that is a rather restricted number of structural features are attested and their frequency is rather small” (232). That his use of Sicilian increases rapidly in his later works, most likely comes as no surprise to any of Camilleri's readers. And again, Russo shows the historical and the Montalbano novels are on par, with both of them “bursting the bank” when it comes to Sicilian features: “dialect has flooded the whole text” (233). Most surprisingly, in this reviewer's opinion, is Russo's conclusion about Camilleri's use of Sicilian in his middle and later works that she studied. While in earlier works, one could still, indeed, make the assumption that Sicilian operated as a sociolinguistic marker, Russo concludes her research stating that, especially in the later works she has analyzed, “Sicilian structural marking expands and bundles throughout the entire novels and no obvious meaningful patterns can be outlined, producing a densely marked text (i.e. a text written almost completely in Camilleri's Sicilian, or “vigatese”) and, consequently, voiding Sicilian of linguistic situational functionality” (233). This contradicts the heretofore widely accepted explanation of Camilleri's use of dialect as an item of situational functionality and makes this book an important and valuable contribution to scholarly research on Andrea Camilleri.