Leonardo Sciascia (1921–1989)

I wouldn't really recommend this to someone as a novel, but as a kind of j'accuse poem, it's very nice. I imagine it having a long life in University courses on 20th century Italian History and Culture, but not literature.

On the other hand, maybe it's expanding what you can do with a novel; it does away with names, for the most part, and character, and narrative coherence, but it does a great deal with conspiracy, the personal cost of chasing the Mafia in post-war Italy, and almost total show more minimalism in everything else. It's also a nice counterpoint to the American mythologization of the Mafia thanks to, e.g., The Godfather and its sequels. Brando and his offspring are variations on the American-immigrant-just-struggling-to-make-it-in-this-crazy-world; individualists kind of sort of living out the American dream. In Day of the Owl, mafia types are one more part of a corrupt, not entirely post-fascist system.

It's also interesting to read this with Kushner's 'Flamethrowers' and Ferrante's work still hovering in my mind. Late 20th century Italy is a truly fascinating place, though not one I'd really want to have lived in. Sciascia, like Ferrante after him, does a particularly good job showing how the communist/fascist faultlines make everyday life treacherous even for basically good people. show less

Il giorno della civetta is an unusual sort of crime novel - it comes with an afterword in which the author explains that he spent nearly a year on "making it shorter", and it's hard to spot anything in this 140-page story that isn't absolutely essential. We don't get to see the detective choosing his lunch, rippling his chest muscles or juggling four girlfriends (as we would expect to in a Montalbano story), characters simply don't exist outside the context of the case (and in many cases show more don't even have names), and descriptions of people and places are stripped down to the barest minimum we need to follow the story. In the one place where Sciascia allows himself to dwell for a paragraph or so on the architecture of a police station it turns out that it's crucial for us to know that you can see into one particular room from another, for example.

In the fifties and sixties the received opinion in northern Italy seems to have been that the Sicilian Mafia had been wiped out before the War, under the Fascist police chief Mora (who was not bound by any finicky little constitutional limitations of power), and that Sicily was now a quiet, civilised province, albeit not the sort of place respectable people were likely to have any reason to visit. If northern Italians ever thought about the Mafia at all, then it was as operatic brigands or as a kind of rural benevolent society helping peasant farmers to survive.

What Sciascia wants to do with this book is to shake that complacency and show people outside Sicily what organised crime really means, and the nasty things that happen to a society when a criminal organisation is allowed to take over the role normally filled by government and the rule of law. And how difficult it is to get out of that situation.

A local building contractor is gunned down in a Sicilian village square on his way to take the early-morning bus into town (fascinating to reflect that there was a time before the age of the White Van when builders actually travelled on public transport...). The Carabinieri investigate, and soon find out that he has been shot after refusing an invitation to pay protection money. They get a name for the assassin, and Captain Bellodi arrests him and even manages to persuade him to make a statement confessing the murder, but then the case hits a brick wall - any further action by the police is blocked by politicians in Rome who clearly owe favours to the same people as paid for the killing. Bellodi quietly goes on sick-leave whilst his deputy recategorises the crime as the result of sexual jealousy.

But this isn't just a political lesson - Sciascia is clearly a very competent writer, and sometimes - as in the dialogues between Bellodi and the three Mafia figures he has to interrogate - displays remarkable technical skill as well as subtlety and efficiency in the way he characterises people.

I was impressed by a wonderful description of a farcical parliamentary debate in which the secretary of state barefacedly denies the existence of the Mafia (we have previously seen the same man giving a speech on a balcony with the local Capo on one side of him and a notorious hitman on the other) and is saved from any actual questioning when the right-wing deputies get into a slanging match with the Communists. This struck me as owing a lot to Zola when I read it, but according to Sciascia it's the one scene in the book that was taken directly from life. show less

I really enjoyed this collection of fable-like short stories that dive deep into the culture of Sicily, revolving around family, the church, the Mafia, and a real suspicion of anyone from the north. The stories are often darkly funny and pretty cynical with enjoyable twists that often involve an ironic just desserts. The stories were written between 1959 and 1972 and were selected by Sciascia for this collection (I don't know how to pronounce it, but what a delightfully symmetrical name!). show more In addition to short stories he published crime novels set in Sicily and I'd love to see what he does with that genre and a little more room to spread out. show less

on Equal Danger: A detective story and an exploration of frustration and paranoia, Equal Danger is at once unforgettable and almost incomprehensible. Judges are being murdered in an unnamed, very corrupt country; Inspector Rogas is called in but things keep getting in his way. Sciascia wrote this as a parody of the detective genre and in the Note at the end he says "I began to write it with amusement, and as I was finishing it I was no longer amused." That kind of sums up my feelings too!

On show more Day of the Owl: more conventional procedural but still shot through with angst and frustration, finally acceptance, of a broken system that both allows the crime to happen and impedes justice. show less