Andrea Camilleri's books dedicated to commissioner Montalbano are apparently simple and equally (apparently) difficult. Written in a language for initiates - like the prose of Carlo Emilio Gadda stuffed with Lombard and Romanesco, or the Florentine sixteenth century of Monaldi & Sorti - soon become extremely enjoyable. Just familiarize yourself with the music of his Sicilian, which results after a few pages understandable at every latitude. Italian, thanks to continuous linguistic insertions, is expanded and enriched with new possibilities, new meanings. But this is not the only gimmick of the author of Porto Empedocle, born in 1925, who disseminates the text (and the narration) of surprising finds. In his last novel dedicated to the policeman of Vigàta, The Catalanotti method, references to genre literature, from Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie, are wasted, with real flashes of irony; and seems to feel the author's enjoyment in making the plot unravel, as when "in a miraculous pillucula arrivaro ours".

The music of the Vigàtese, of Montalbano in love - yes, because the crush that our commissioner takes this time is epic - is now a counterpoint to La gazza ladra now to a poem by Wisawa Szymborska: "Listen to how your heart beats ».

The novel opens with a dead man; rather two. The first is Mimì Augello, during a daring escape from a lover who is discovered by her husband, and who has the habit (though it is called Genoveffa) to present himself as Genevieve. The second corpse is the one that opens the most theatrical (and Pirandellian) case of Camilleri's work. Carmelo Catalanotti, allegedly killed by a knife to the heart, is a wealthy man who was a stage director for improvisation. On the scene of the crime a new detective of the scientific bursts in, Antonia; it will also be thanks to his acumen if Montalbano will find a solution. "Forsi - the narrator reasons - needed to be accompanied by the categorical imperative: cherchez la femme".

Camilleri, now forced by blindness to dictate the text to his assistant Valentina Alferj (the only one able to decrypt her language), appears more and more like the Tiresia indie of Greek mythology (character that the writer has interpreted at the Syracuse Festival). Unable to see how Borges (who in turn dictated to María Kodama), Camilleri seems to sharpen his abilities, seems to see beyond. In the same way as the prophet made blind by Athena. And he gives to his Montalbano that "immense and reasoned unruliness of all the senses" so dear to the seer poet par excellence, Rimbaud.

The key to yellow - it soon becomes evident - lies in the drama that Catalanotti was supposed to stage; but it is the director's method, in fact, that makes the commissioner extremely curious. A technique similar to that of Grotowski, inventor of the poor theater, convinced that the actor should not simply illustrate the text but perform an "act of the soul". The auditions soon become real initiation rites. Where reality and fiction mix and exchange between them. "Do you want to see that it was true that the killer always returns to the scene of the crime?"