La storia finzione del re di Girgenti di Andrea Camilleri

Abstract

Published in 2001 and Mondello prize winner in 2002, the novel Il re di Girgenti represents one of the best proofs of Camilleri as narrator. Firmly believing in the historical novel, Camilleri builds on a real fact, a biography based on invented documentation, first sign of his experimental will. But, above all, the language is the field on which Camilleri focuses his attention. To the numerous Sicilian terms are added Italian and Spanish ones; great space is given to intertextuality. The result is a stratification not without meaning. The “parlata stramma” corresponds to the strangeness, to the distortions of society, in which the popular classes always have the worst, as some sentences attest. In the foreground, then, is Camilleri’s civil commitment.