Andrea Camilleri – The fly game

Andrea Camilleri (6 September 1925 – 17 July 2019) is known as one of the most important and influential Italian writers of the twentieth century. He started as film director and screenwriter and the turning point of his career was the production of the Montalbano series on RAI TV, based on his novels. The influence of the master Pirandello has always been well present in his writing. This recollection of short stories, entitled “The fly game”, is a voyage through time, back to a deep Southern Italy tradition and culture that are slowly fading away due to the coming of technology into our lives. When the writer and his friends were children, they spent their summer mornings on the beach putting a little coin on the sand and waiting for a fly to rest on it, determining the end of the game. Meanwhile, those innocent children, keeping silent, wandered their dreams on their inscrutable future. This is the background of the short stories told here, rooted in the old tradition of Camilleri’s homeland, where peasant and marine culture gather, Sicily. However, beyond this first level of interpretation, the reader is led by the author to the origin of literary creation itself. Along with the obvious time travel, what involves the reader is a descent within the self, the secret place where stories are generated from a little micro-anecdote left to the care of the sub-conscious. This little book is a precious pearl, influencing even the dialect of his land. It shows the greatness of a writer as Eliot described in his “Tradition and Individual talent”.