The world of letters today stops for a moment to remember the 25th anniversary of the birth of Leonardo Sciascia, writer, essayist, journalist, politician, poet and elementary school teacher. For the occasion, we decided to select some of his most beautiful books. Which you loved most The day of the owl
Of this short novel about the mafia, which appeared for the first time in 1961, Leonardo Sciascia wrote: ‘… it took me even a year, from one summer to the next, to make this story shorter. But the result that my work of ‘digging’ wanted to achieve was aimed more than at giving measure, essentiality and rhythm to the story, at warding off the possible and possible intolerances of those who could be considered, more or less directly, affected by my representation. . Because in Italy, you know, you can’t joke with the saints or the infantrymen: and let alone if, instead of joking, you want to be serious’. Because Leonardo Sciascia is an intellectual more relevant than ever
We host the judgment of the well-known art critic Luca Nannipieri, whose book “What is the history of art for” (Skira) has been published, on the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989). A simple story
‘A simple story’ and a very complicated story, a Sicilian mystery, with a background of mafia and drugs. Yet never – and it is a real tour de force – does the author find himself forced to name both one and the other word. It all begins with a phone call to the police, with a truncated message, with an apparent suicide. And immediately, as if we were witnessing the accelerated growth of a flower, the story expands, expands, becomes tangled, without even giving us the opportunity to reflect. Faced with the proliferation of facts, not only us readers but also the only character who seeks the truth in the novel, a brigadier, are called to make our reflexes act in the shortest time – a time that can be reduced, as in a memorable scene of the novel, in a split second.Candido or a dream made in Sicily
Candido Munafo was born in a cave in Sicily on the night of the landing of the Americans, in 1943. And this novel follows the events of his life up to 1977 in a series of chapters that refer to those of Candide by Voltaire. The form of the count philosophique, particularly congenial to Sciascia, allows him to take the right distance – and from a light, airy step to this book, which is perhaps the most intimate and secret of all his novels. ‘Things are always simple’ Candido murmurs sometimes. And it will be precisely his desire to name things by their name to cause him various misadventures. This meek, stubborn and thoughtful young man ends up appearing, in the eyes of the world, as a ‘little monster’. To each of him his own
The novel of the dark, cruel Sicily. The drama of a lucid investigator who, the more he investigated, the more he felt involved in the ambiguity, in the ambiguity, morally and sensually. The sea, the color of wine
And a book of short stories written between 1959 and 1972. So Sciascia himself: ‘… I seem to have put together a sort of summary of my activity up to now and from which it comes out … which in recent years I have continued for my road, without looking either to the right or to the left (that is looking to the right and to the left), without uncertainties, without doubts, without crisis (that is, with many uncertainties, with many doubts, with deep crises); and that between the first and the last of these stories is established as a circularity. A circularity that has not at all affected, and indeed exalts, the happiness and effectiveness of the stories gathered here as in a brief summary of the many narrative voices of Sciascia.
