La concessione del telefono / the telephone concession

«Camilleri wrote because he enjoyed it, and it is evident that while writing La concessione del telefono, he had a lot of fun. And along with him, the reader has fun too, constantly accompanied by the author’s irony and the increasingly hilarious twists of a classic comedy of errors. But this divertissement is not just about laughter; in fact, at a certain point, it risks not being funny at all. As the story progresses, it becomes all too clear that there is something worse behind it: the eternal drama of Italian bureaucracy, but above all, a millennial pessimism that takes for granted that things that start badly will end even worse, that anyone who tries to bring a minimum of rationality and common sense into madness will be crushed, and that every system rewards the worst».

Alessandro Barbero