LA SCOMPARSA DI PATÒ / THE DISAPPEARENCE OF PATÒ

One of Camilleri’s most entertaining and original novels: in the form of a dossier, through a collection of documents, reports, letters, even anonymous wall writings, it follows the thread of a mysterious disappearance.
A certain Andrea Camilleri, a self-styled “author” who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century, sorted inside a binder a slew of documents (including confidential ones) recovered from the archives. All we can deduce about him is that he has relatives in Vigàta, probably three daughters: the “three kind sisters,” Andreina, Elisabetta and Maria Carmela. His erudition makes him as fussy as a philologist, going so far as to apologize to his readers for having included in the first of the four classifiers of the dossier the article of an approximate and even plagiaristic professor. Camilleri, in this hilarious novel (published by Mondadori in 2000), has given himself a nineteenth-century double; to whom he has delegated the implementation of a virtuoso novel of apocrypha, which is one of his masterpieces.