“Every morning at seven, fresh, washed, shaved, dressed to the nines, I sit at my desk and write. I am disciplined, the perfect writing employee. With some bad habits, perhaps, because while I write I smoke a lot and drink beer. And I write, I write ceaselessly.” Summer 2016. Andrea Camilleri, at 91, battles the darkness of blindness by recalling the images of his memory. And he begins to dictate. Thus begins a true exercise in memory, a kind of “work for the holidays.” 23 stories in 23 days, about the memories that have marked his life and work, which also serve as precious vignettes of the history of his homeland over the past hundred years.
The stories are accompanied by the drawings of six established Italian illustrators, who attempt to visually express the emotion of the book. The ashes of Luigi Pirandello, who in 1942 five high school students, among them Andrea Camilleri, try to convince the authorities to move him from Rome to Agrigento, honoring his wish. Back in 1940 at the summer house of his maternal grandparents, the day Mussolini declared war on France and England. The preemptive censorship of 1960, which even reaches the arrest of the film critic who published, under the eloquent title The Army “I Love You,” a text about the exploits of the Italian army in Greece during the war.
The narratives of his Russian friend the actor Pietro Saroff about Chekhov’s opinion of Stanislavski, about Antonioni and Monica Vitti, about the side effects of high mountains on the behavior of a man who was born in a village one and a half meters above sea level, about the smoking obsession, about Inspector Camilleri, about the Beauty he once had the fortune to behold...
“Camilleri, the blind writer with a thousand eyes and thousands of memories, tells us his small epic in the enchanting places where he actually lived. What no blindness can erase or eliminate.” Il Messaggero “Reading it, you discover the source of inspiration for the beloved author.” Corriere della Sera
