Leonardo Sciascia -Porte aperte
The judicial machinery is in motion – and from the very beginning, the shadow of the death penalty looms over the trial. In Italy, "si dorme con le porte aperte": this was one of the most sinister maxims of the regime, which was keen to emphasize, in the absence of freedom, its cult of order. (cited from Adelphi) more
Leonardo Sciascia -Il cavaliere e la morte
The protagonist of this novel is a police commissioner, whose only name here is Vice: a substitute, perhaps for something that is utterly absent, a stand-in for a reality that has already vanished, or stretched to the point of becoming unreal, like currency in times of inflation. (from Adelphi) more
Leonardo Sciascia -A ciascuno il suo
Sober, bitter, subtly sarcastic, and at the same time clear and precise in its outlines, it tells the story of a pharmacist who "lived quietly, had never had any issues, didn't engage in politics," and one day receives an anonymous letter threatening him with death. (from Adelphi) more
Leonardo Sciascia -Il Consiglio d’Egitto
Abdallah Mohamed ben Olman, the ambassador of Morocco, finds himself in Palermo in December 1782 due to a storm that has shipwrecked his vessel on the Sicilian shores. It is this circumstance that ignites in the mind of Abate Vella, a Maltese tasked with showing the ambassador the beauties of Palermo, an audacious plan: to transform the Arabic manuscript of any account of the prophet's life, preserved on the island, into a shocking political text, Il Consiglio d’Egitto, which would allow for the abolition of all feudal privileges and could therefore serve as a spark for a revolutionary plot. (from Adelphi) more
Leonardo Sciascia -Una storia semplice
A simple story is a very complicated story, a Sicilian thriller, set against a backdrop of mafia and drugs. Yet never – and it is a real tour de force – does the author find himself compelled to mention either word.
(quote Adelphi) more
Leonardo Sciascia -Occhio di capra
... it is perhaps the most agile and sharp introduction to Sicilian civilization that we can read. The foundation is the richest and most mysterious: language. And Sciascia lovingly investigates it, recognizing in the most bizarre sayings the concretion of entire stories, obscure metaphysical intuitions, and fairy-tale themes... (quoted from Adelphi) more
Leonardo Sciascia -Gli zii di Sicilia
"And I felt like an acrobat balancing on a wire, looking at the world in a joy of flight and then flipping it over, flipping myself over, and seeing death beneath me, a wire suspending me over a vortex of human heads and lights, the drum rolling death. In short, I was seized by the fury to see everything from the inside, as if every person, every thing, every event were like a book that one opens and reads: even the book is a thing, you can place it on a table and just look at it, perhaps using it to prop up a wobbly table or to smack someone on the head: but if you open it and read it, it becomes a world; and why shouldn't everything be opened and read and become a world?" (from Gli zii di Sicilia) more
Leonardo Sciascia -Morte dell’inquisitore
"It is an unfinished book, one that I will never complete, which I am always tempted to rewrite and that I do not rewrite, waiting to discover something more."
(L. Sciascia) more
Leonardo Sciascia -Il giorno della civetta
Sciascia subjected the text to a delicate process of refinement, distilling it to its essential traits with the art of "cavare": and, seen years later, this work reveals itself more than ever as a cunning of art. (from Adelphi) more
Leonardo Sciascia -Il contesto
... he started writing this novel as a "diversion" – and soon it transformed into something terribly serious in his hands. In a nameless yet familiar country to us all, a series of murders and official funerals marks public life. With absolute clarity, but against a dark backdrop, the face of an anonymous protagonist is sketched in this story, that power which – in the words of Sciascia – "gradually degrades into the impenetrable form of a chain that we can roughly call mafioso" (from Adelphi). more
Leonardo Sciascia -Todo modo
If we had to indicate a fictional form capable of revealing how that viscous mixture of power, which Italian politics had the unfortunate privilege of producing for many years, is composed and manifests itself, it would be sufficient to refer to the concise pages of Todo modo... more
Leonardo Sciascia -Il mare colore del vino
... between the first and the last of these tales, a circularity is established: a circularity that is not that of the dog biting its own tail...
(L. Sciascia) more
Leonardo Sciascia -La scomparsa di Majorana
"Subject: Disappearance (with intent to commit suicide) of Professor Ettore Majorana." A police document to initiate investigations on one of those cases, favored by Sciascia, where the unsolved enigma, with its hidden truth, compels one to go beyond the news, into the soul of a man. (quote, Adelphi) more
Leonardo Sciascia -La strega e il capitano
Once again, what troubles Sciascia is stripping away the countless masks of power from History, until revealing its repugnant and primal face.
(cit. Adelphi) more
Salvatore Satta -Il giorno del giudizio
- an old family, the Sanna Carboni, of wealthy notaries, representatives of an authority that belongs, in every sense, to another world. The day of judgment follows the story of this family between the end of the last century and the early decades of our own: and, along with it, the entire town of Nuoro, from the notables to the "rich pale women who dreamed and grew sad in seclusion," from shepherds to bandits, to the idlers of the Corso, to priests, vagabonds, and prostitutes... (cit. Adelphi) more
Joseph Roth -La Cripta dei Cappuccini
... the fate of young Trotta begins to plunge, as within him a sense of desperate bitterness becomes increasingly sharp and around him is revealed a degrading world, already ready to impose itself. Silent, a conscious witness, he will traverse the madness of war and the humiliations of the post-war period, discovering himself to be an outsider in the midst of a new order whose pettiness and violence he already perceives, he will witness the entry of the Nazis into Vienna, the seal of all deaths... (cit. Adelphi) more
Joseph Roth -La leggenda del santo bevitore
The Legend of the Holy Drunkard was published for the first time in 1939, a few months after the death of Joseph Roth, an exile in Paris – and can be considered, in many ways, his testament, the transparent and mysterious parable that encapsulates the essence of its author, now rediscovered as one of the most extraordinary storytellers of this century. (cit. Adelphi) more
Joseph Roth -Fuga senza fine
Tunda is an entity now foreign everywhere, belonging truly to nothing: "I only know that it wasn’t, as they say, ‘unease’ that drove me, but on the contrary – an absolute calm. I have nothing to lose. I am neither brave nor curious about adventures. A wind pushes me, and I do not fear to go to the bottom." (cit. Adelphi) more
Joseph Roth -La milleduesima notte
Reaching a clairvoyant and desperate maturity, the narrator Roth takes here an additional distance from the story he tells. In vain would we search in these pages for those mediamente autobiographical characters who in his other novels were surrounded by the aura of Roth's own sensitivity. (cit. Adelphi) more
Joseph Roth -Giobbe
- Roth's Job is named Mendel Singer; he is a "simple man" who works as a 'teacher,' that is, he teaches the Bible to children...
- His life flows quietly, "between meager banks," but enclosed in an untouched order, until the birth of his fourth child, Menuchim, who is impaired.
From that moment on, if "everything sudden is evil," as Mendel Singer says, many evils begin to rush into his life.
He will have to leave his homeland to go to New York, in a world that is completely foreign to him, and his wife – once again a memorable female character – his daughter and his sons will each be touched by war, death, and madness. (cit. Adelphi) more