BOO KS
645
village which was marked by the same kind of astute and humble
attention, amounting to poetry, that distinguished Levi's famous
Christ
Stopped at Eboli
-
or, to think of our own
M ezzogiorno
-
J
ames Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Since then, besides some stories,
sketches, a play and an essay on Pirandello, he has written three
notable short novels. The first, published here as
Mafia Vendetta,
brought him an immediate and dangerous fame, for it concerned a
Mafia killing. His most recent,
A Ciascuno il Suo
("To Each His
Due") is another topical crime story, Sicilian style. The earlier historical
novel just published in English,
The Council of Egypt,
is also de–
terminedly preoccupied with the definition of Sicilian experience, an
effort, like Lampedusa's
The Leopard,
to explain Sicily by her past.
For the form of
Mafia Vendetta
Sciascia apologizes a little dis–
ingenuously in a postscript, declaring that he was "unable
to
write
the book with that complete freedom to which every writer is en–
titled," and consequently made more anonymous and abbreviated his
references to current crime in Sicily and the national government,
pruning it down severely to its present length, a little over a hundred
pages. But it seems not so much a stripped-down novel as an achieved
movie-script, and it is likely that Sciascia, like other contemporary
Italian novelists, is inspired by Italy's greatest postwar art form. His
novel, or novella, is built almost entirely of stretches of dialogue to
which the barest minimum of narrative and description is added. The
disconnections and obscurities that result really intensify the dramatic
effect of the story, delaying the solution of the plot until its moral
value has been explored.
For a "mystery," a "giallo," in the technical sense, is, of course,
what the book half pretends to be. It is the story of a mysterious
murder and of the policeman who sets himself to track the criminal.
But nothing could be less commonplace than the unfolding revelations
of this manhunt. For one thing, the murder turns out not to be that
"crime of passion" beloved by the popular press, though that is exactly
what it is made out to be by those who wish to disguise its true
character. The murdered man is a small building contractor who had
defied the organized interests controlling building in his town. As our
Captain of
carabiniere
interrogates suspects and noses after evidence,
the connection completes itself not merely between victim and assassin,
but elongates to include the fingerman who set up the murder, the
Mafia
capo
and his friends who ordered it, even the Honored Mem–
ber from the district and the Ministry itself, in Rome. The establish–
ment of guilt assumes the significance of social analysis, even though
the police case collapses in the familiar Sicilian way when the accused
