A novelist, polemicist, occasional politician, and perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize, Leonardo Sciascia died in 1989. He left behind a formidable array of books, all of which revolve around the hallucinatory realities of Sicilian life. But the stories collected in The Wine-Dark Sea may be the best introduction to his work. They offer a kind of capsule-history of Sicily, ranging through several hundred years and engaging the country's events from their exhilarating and terrible underside. A good comparison might be the naif's-eye view of Waterloo that Stendhal creates in The Charterhouse of Parma. (Sciascia recalls Stendhal in other ways, too; he shares the same adamant clarity, the same bone-dry wit, which may explain why he's always been a hard sell in the United States.) These tales all have a certain riddling quality, whether they're providing a nugget of Sicilian history or staging one of Sciascia's many comedies of ironic disillusionment. The superb title story is about the bottomless chasm separating Sicilians and outsiders, bridged only temporarily by a group of strangers travelling from Rome to Agrigento. "Philology," the closest thing to a classic Pirandellian exercise, lets us eavesdrop on two mafiosi cramming for an upcoming session with a Commission of Enquiry. The subject: how to answer the question, "What is the Mafia?" They consult a battery of dictionaries, arguing about the merits of various definitions and etymologies. We are left, in the end, with this reply: "Culture, my friend, is a wonderful thing." So too is fiction, at least in Sciascia's hands. He offers little in the way of certainty, but his questions, posed with deadly accuracy, are worth the answers of a dozen other authors. --James Marcus, Amazon.com
From the Publisher
Media Reviews
Few writers managed to capture the taciturn Sicilian character better than Sciascia, who always understood the power of implication in his work. [A] superb collection The TimesThere are 13 stories in The Wine-Dark Sea.. I guarantee you will wish there were more Big Issue in the North
Granta Books are to be congratulated on making available again in English one of Europes most challenging twentieth-century writers TLS
About the Author
Leonardo Sciascia was born in Sicily in 1912 and died there in 1989. Like Joseph Roth, Sciascia worked with deceptively simple forms - books about crime, historical novels, political thrillers - and was a master of lucid and accessible prose. This polished surface conceals great depths of sophistication and an intense engagement with the moral and historical problems of modern Italy, especially of his native Sicily. His books are rooted in a particular culture; they speak to anyone who has ever wondered how people can endure unbearable injustice.
