Leonardo Sciascia – the pessimist’s pessimist. A small man of long silences, a stubborn accusatory fellow, he was the moral centre of his country, the expert on its ills. Born in 1921 into a “violent, backward, lawless land”, Sciascia rarely left Sicily and saw its Mafia problem as an extended metaphor for the universal difficulty of getting justice, of accountability, of maintaining a state that was decent.
This terrific biography by Caroline Moorehead says he created a “consciousness of doubt” as typified in his brilliant writings, his tricksy “gialli”, his police thrillers so-called after the yellow jackets used for Italian translations of Agatha Christie. His best-sellers were “an excellent vehicle for his exposés of abuses of power”.
We learn he had “never been able to love Sicily wholeheartedly without feeling a counterpart of impatience, resentment and dislike”. As with Joyce (Sciascia was a fan of Dubliners but not Ulysses) he was an “uomo solo”, a man alone, raging against the paralysis of his nation. His writings took swipes at the church, the state and, most dangerously, the Mafia. He was a quiet man compared to Pasolini, his extrovert friend, who said of Sciascia that he had “the intellectual courage to tell the truth and political reality are incompatible in Italy”.
We are reminded of the Anni di piombo, the Years of Lead, where, to take 1979 as an example, there were 650 deaths due to political and Mafia related violence. Compare that to Northern Ireland: in the same year, an estimated 121. Sciascia’s enduring fear was that Italy would revive fascism. Moorehead says he thought you “needed to be ready to do battle whenever it raised its head”. He saw writing as a denunciation, to show in his fiction the nexus of collusion.
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Initially Sciascia thought Lampedusa’s The Leopard too pessimistic but in time he’d come to agree with his elder’s bad prognosis for Sicily and Italy. Feted by Calvino, Gore Vidal and George Steiner, his The Day of the Owl alone still sells more than 25,000 copies a year. Sciascia died in 1989, his motto as regards Sicily: ne tecum, ne sine te, vivere possum. Or as Bono might have it: I can’t live, with or without you.
