Midnight in Sicily - Softcover

Robb, Peter

3.8

1,532 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860465978 ISBN 13: 9781860465970

Publisher: Harvill Pr, 1999

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A journey into the heart of Sicily, using art, food, history and literature to shed light on southern Italy's legacy of political corruption and violent crime. The book takes as its starting point the ongoing trial of seven-times Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti.

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About the Author:

Peter Robb was born in Toorak in 1946 and grew up in Australia and New Zealand. He arrived in Europe in 1971, working as a night-club bouncer in England, a philologist in Finland, and a teacher in France. He returned to Australia in the mid '70s and there taught English to immigrants. In 1978 he set off for South America, but he got no further than Naples. He spent the next 15 years in southern Italy teaching and writing. He has recently completed a book on Carvaggio entitled M.

From Kirkus Reviews:

If it's true, as the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia once said, that Sicily is a metaphor for the modern world, then author Robb has plumbed the depths of the world. Midnight in Sicily is a work from another age and era. Perhaps only in the 18th and 19th centuries would a foreigner have attempted to write about art, food, history, travel, and the Mafia together. But it soon becomes apparent that in the hands of Robb the landscape of Sicily becomes a metaphor for its history; history is inextricably tied to food; food is inseparable from art. Again, it takes a foreigner to see Italy and Sicily in clearer terms than the Sicilians and Italians themselves. The heart of darkness in this tale is Giulio Andreotti, the most powerful politician in postwar Italy: seven-time prime minister and once hailed as the greatest political mind since Bismarck. Ironically, Andreotti is a Roman who sold his soul in Sicily in a Faustian bargain to secure a political power base from which to rule Italy practically undisturbed for decades. Robb, who has written for the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, masterfully recreates scenes as benevolent as friends enjoying a meal or as diabolical as Andreotti's meeting with the most brutal crime boss in all of Italy. There are shrewd insights (``Beyond a certain threshold, power erases embarrassment''); telling phrases (Andreotti, leader of the Christian Democrats, is called a ``sacristy rat''); and deep political/historical revelations (such as Cosa Nostra's permanent aim of eliminating the historic memory built up by those few who've understood that Cosa Nostra was a state within a state). A barbecue becomes an occasion for a learned excursus on the history of the fork. This narrative is itself an eclectic and sumptuous meal that- -through no fault of the author's--leaves the diner with a bitter taste in the mouth. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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