SCIASCIA, LEONARDO

(1921–1989)

Born near Agrigento in Sicily, Sciascia began his literary career in the 1950s, but it was in the early 1960s that he published the two works that have since received most attention outside Italy, Zii siciliani (Sicilian Uncles, 1960) and Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl, 1961). The latter book, with its portrayal of the vain efforts of a northern Italian policeman to get to the bottom of a murder committed in a provincial Sicilian town, was made into a successful film by Damiano Damiani.

Sciascia was a prolific writer, but two books in particular warrant mention. Il mare di colore vino (The Wine Dark Sea, 1973) is an extraordinary collection of short stories that mix humor, black irony, and pathos as few contemporary writers have succeeded in doing; Candido owero un sogno fatto in Sicilia (Candido, Or a Dream That Took Place in Sicily,1977), which portrays a guileless Sicilian whose personal idealism leads him into disillusioning experiences with the equally dishonest philosophies of Catholicism and communism, is a brilliant contemporary reworking of Voltaire’s Candide. Sciascia was essentially a moralist. Since the Italian political class is not distinguished by its integrity, Sciascia inevitably became involved in political polemic. He famously argued in the 1970s that he was for neither the terrorists of the Brigate Rosse/Red Brigades (BR) nor the Italian state, a moral equation that struck many as repulsive. He was a parliamentary deputy for the Partito Radicale/Radical Party (PR). In an interview-book toward the end of his life, he summarized the purpose of his own work as being that of using “Sicily as a metaphor” for the human condition. He died in Palermo in June 1989.