Scrivere facile. Storia redazionale di «1912 + 1»

Sciascia is not an 'easy' author, owing to his allusive, dense, and syntactically complex style, but his writing practice was very simple: he would place a sheet of paper in his typewriter and let his ideas, which were already organized in his mind, spill out, fully formed, onto the page; this enabled him to write at a steady rate of around four pages a day. «1912 + 1» was written in this fluent way (on summer mornings at La Noce) as the original typescript shows: a first draft with few corrections and revisions. The essay also examines the story of the book: conceived as a play, it became an 'investigative novella', and represented a decisive step in Sciascia's return to fiction, as «Il cavaliere e la morte testifies».