Leonardo Sciascia (1921–1989)

A 'detective' novel, it's really more than that--a tightly written novel about society and life in small town Sicily. Sciascia somehow gives the reader a real sense of place without lengthy descriptions. One of those books that's thin (Sciascia, in an interview, talked about 'thin' and 'thick' writers) yet complex, but reads very cleanly and quickly. No idea how he did it.

Sono passati 52 anni, niente è cambiato, compreso il fatto che qualcuno, agli alti livelli della politica, cerchi di dire che la mafia non esiste.
Ci sono stati morti, umili ed eccelletnti, c'è stata una commissione parlamentare, ci sono condanne definitive che non hanno tolto i politici condannati dal loro posto, ma l'intreccio tra affari e mafia si è sempre più rinsaldato, e i corretti metodi di indagine sono ancora quelli suggeriti da Sciascia, e ancora non messi in opera, sebbene ce show more ne si riempia la bocca.
E intanto i quaraquaquà proliferano.
Libro importantissimo per capire la nostra nazione, e opera letteraria di alto livello. show less

What's strange about To Each His Own is how it feels like it's not the story Leonardo Sciascia wanted to write. Based on the awkward digressions thrown in here and there, Sciascia really wanted to drop some serious social commentary about contemporary Sicily, but all he had was a standard detective story. Professor Laurana, a man attempting to solve a double homicide, does his best to follow leads, but he keeps running into people that want to bloviate on the ills of their island far more show more than they want to help the investigation. The point these minor characters care most about is that Sicily's corruption is so foundational that trying to clean things up would do more harm than good, which is fine, I guess, but I just don't find it particularly compelling. "Forget it, Laurana. It's Chinatown." only needs to be said once.

The novel's saving grace is its humor. The social club at which all the town's men drink and bicker and perv out is an awesome place. I wanted to be there to watch Colonel Salvaggio throw a big tantrum about the potential impropriety of one of Arturo Pecorillo's jokes and then five minutes later start pretending to suckle on his friend's widow's boob.

The story is fine, but I think Sciascia's efforts fell short of his ambitions here. 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