"And, trust me, I am grateful to Carlo for having deliberately got us into trouble, for the night he made us spend, and for the various enterprises, senseless only on the surface, that he involved us in later on, and then for various others, not in the mountains, which I got into on my own, by following his doctrine.
"The thing is," he says, "it involves us all".
For all the jokes and the play — the fatuous self-importance, the fumbles and errors, the disasters large and small — he creates a narrative that involves us in the same way the narrative of a standard fiction film does.
He always involved us, so the creative process was something we felt we could do, too".
"It actually involves us all.
Somehow, more by what he doesn't say than by what he does, he manages to implicate and involve us, the readers, at every stage.
"The Caucasus is far away, it's way over there, 'those dummies who keep blowing themselves up,' that's what Uncle John says — it doesn't involve us," he said.
He is an urbane guide, involving us in his personal adventures.
He recalls an anecdote Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 laureate, once told him: "In the early 80s, he was working hard to involve US president Ronald Reagan in the anti-apartheid struggle.
