Synopsis
A final collection from one of Italy's greatest contemporary writers introduces a stunning range of characters, from the world-weary to the wealthy and beautiful, in four short tales of murder and the investigations that follow in their wake.
Reviews
Readers unfamiliar with the great Italian writer Sciascia (1921-1989) have a rare pleasure in store in making his acquaintance with this volume of four novellas. A Sicilian who built his literary reputation with tales of crime that are rich in political significance, Sciascia is known for his lean but brooding prose and supple philosophical investigations: in his terrain, mystery centers not around crime but around justice. The works here, written in the two years before his death, are representative in terms of style as well as subject matter. The title piece examines a judge's refusal to impose the death penalty during a 1937 murder trial despite pressures from the Fascist authorities, who take pride in the fact that under their stern rule "you can sleep with open doors." More memorable still is the darkly revelatory "A Straightforward Tale," in which a police deputy suspects that what his superior rules a clear-cut suicide has a more sinister explanation--its conclusion seems inevitable only in its perfection. In a welcome bit of lagniappe, Farrellno id given supplies a graceful afterword to situate Sciascia within a critical and historical context.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Sciascia, the elegantly learned and quite politically fearless Sicilian writer who died in 1989, wrote most of his fiction in the Sixties and early Seventies; but late in his life he wrote these novellas, in which his patented interests--the law, fascism, classic French and Italian literature, metaphysics--all recombine. Best here is the title novella--a magistrate's sorrowful insistence on conscience during the Fascist period, refusing to sentence a man to death: a meditation on capital punishment, moral traduction, and cultural imprecision (``to see European history in the guise of the Russians who would like to be Germans, Germans who'd like to be French, French who would like to be half-German and half-Italian while still remaining French, Spaniards who would settle for being English if they can't be Romans, and Italians who would like to be anything and everything except Italian''). Equally interesting, and somewhat fleshier, is ``Death and the Knight''--a terminally ill police investigator's world-weary slog through lies and much more obvious (though denied) truths. Sciascia (Sicilian Uncles, etc.) here is a compiler of Stendhalian asides and ruminations rather than a narrative-maker. But these are fine literary artifacts for all that: hung upon the police-procedural framework, the cloth is rich and dark if none to form-fitting. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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