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“Mario, he is still called Mario.”

“Fine, but what did you think about the book?” he insisted anxiously.

Perhaps he was not so interested in my opinion as he was in his own.

“Someone asked me the same question ten years ago”, I recalled. “I thought it deserved to be a best seller.”

“That’s what I said. And it was, it was; in effect, it was a best seller. You realized that pretty quick, like me.

“It wasn’t so difficult. In the first place, it was written by experts on the topic.”

“Undoubtedly”, he interrupted, with contagious enthusiasm.

“Who better to write about idiocy, am I right? Second, the authors are staunch defenders of the market, above all else. I sell, I consume, therefore I am. What other merit could they have but to turn a book into a sales success? If it were an excellent book with limited sales it would be a contradiction. I suppose that for the publisher it’s also not a contradiction that they have sold so many books on the Idiot Continent, right? In the intelligent and successful countries it did not have the same reception.”