MILLICENT
BELL
DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
MAFIA VENDETTA. By
Leonardo Sciascia. Knopf.
$3.95.
THE COUNCIL OF EGYPT. By
Leonardo Sciascia. Knopf.
$4.95.
In southern Italy, the visitor from America, or from the
Italian north, for that matter, encounters something he is inclined to
call "oriental" about the inhabitants. Carlo Levi, exiled by the Fascists
to Lucania, deep in the peninsula's instep, decided that his peasant
neighbors were "pre-Christian" in their stoic despair, their distrust of all
states and churches and of all abstract codes or slogans. A democratic
government has not made so entire a change as one might suppose
since Levi wrote, and attempts at political and social progress, the
renovation of agriculture and the elimination of pervasive civic cor–
ruption still confront an indifference justified for centuries. It is an
attitude to be found in many peasant cultures where life is lived in
unquestioning submission to the vagaries as well as the rhythms of
nature--and to social forces too remote or arbitrary to have relation
to
a man's own efforts-and where death, from one cause or another,
is often violent and unexpected. It survives in the modern Italian
south, and particularly in Sicily, where the bright monotony of
Palermo's new apartment-house girdle, the crisp villas springing up
along the fabulous ancient shore, signify not change, but a new as–
sertion of old habits, power concentrated in a merciless few, every
social resource draining inexorably, along legal and illegal channels,
into certain hands, which in turn distribute, in an evil benevolence, a
calculated quantity to an army of dependents.
As
the reformer soon
discovers, the Sicilian continues to trust in no authority beyond the
family, which is a kind of armed camp outside of which he cultivates
an enormous wariness expressed in the typical indirection of his con–
versation. It is not surprising that Sicily's most famous apostle of
reform, Danilo Dolci, has recognized that nothing is more necessary
or more difficult in Sicily than the task of making a poor man think
himself significant.
Leonardo Sciascia, Sicily'S most discussed writer of the moment,
has made these matters the theme of fiction. His identification with
the Sicilian scene, particularly its unglamorous small-town and peasant
aspect, has marked everything he
has
written since 1956 when he
published "The Parishes of Regalpetra," a description of his native
