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Leonardo Sciascia — Occhio di capra | DeRank™: 0,00

... 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
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"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
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"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
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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
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Stanlio
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Leonardo Sciascia — Il contesto | DeRank™: 0,00

... 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
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Leonardo Sciascia — Todo modo | DeRank™: 0,00

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
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... 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
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"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
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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
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- 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
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... 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
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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
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Joseph Roth — Fuga senza fine | DeRank™: 0,00

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
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Joseph Roth — La milleduesima notte | DeRank™: 0,00

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
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Joseph Roth — Giobbe | DeRank™: 0,00

- 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
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Joseph Roth — Il profeta muto | DeRank™: 0,00

Kargan is primarily a "stateless" person in a world of people who still delude themselves into thinking they have one. After having traveled, "lonely and grim," the roads of the rich who humiliate him, trained immediately in illegality, driven by resentment, by the lust for destruction, and by the desire for an Absolute, Kargan launches into his own war "against society, against the homelands, against the poets and painters who frequent His house," (quote Adelphi) more
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... is one of the rare characters in modern literature that immediately represents a destiny. “I read in your hand that you are a murderer and a saint,” says a gypsy to the young Tarabas... (cit. Adelphi) more
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... many are the paths that Roth explores in these tales, and more than once it can be said that they lead to the land of perfection... (quoted from Adelphi) more
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Joseph Roth — Viaggio in Russia | DeRank™: 0,00

After the early years of enthusiasm for the revolution, when he signed “Roth the Red,” he had now entered a phase of doubt: thus he saw this journey as a valuable opportunity for verification. Attentive, curious, with a bright eye and steady hand, he wandered through the great cities, followed the course of the Volga, ventured among the peoples of Central Asia, writing his correspondences in real time. (cit. Adelphi) more
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... it is a fairy tale about Evil, about its hypnotic power to drive its victims into circular and obsessive stories, which slowly tighten like a noose. This metaphysical, irreducible Evil takes on a peculiarly Russian form here: as a dark connivance between denunciation, resentment, erotic abjection, and the anxiety to atone, punish oneself, confess... (quoted from Adelphi) more
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