Sciascia Leonardo — The Day of the Owl [552]

Needless to say, there is no character or event in this book which bears anything but a fortuitous resemblance to any real person or actual occurrence. — Sciascia Leonardo, The Day of the Owl, 552

Note

The boilerplate disclaimer becomes the book’s final ironic gesture: a novel built to expose how a community’s silence is enforced now ends with its author performing exactly that enforced disclaimer. The phrase ‘needless to say’ is doing double duty — it is needless because everyone knows it is a standard legal shield, and needless because of course it is untrue.