Leonardo Sciascia is a great author who, I am
afraid, will soon run the risk of being forgotten (hopefully this is just
because there is nothing further away from us than the recent past, but I’m
afraid it is because we no longer care about novels on the social and political
changes of the country in the mid-20th century – or is it even more worryingly
that we don’t care about novels full stop?). If people are too lazy to read his
books, they should at least watch the movie inspired by this book, directed by
Francesco Rosi (who stood to cinema like Sciascia stood to literature), with
probably the most famous Italian actor (Marcello Mastroianni, that Marcello), and with my personal
favourite (Gian Maria Volonté).
This book criticized the Vatican at a time in
which it was actually bold to do so, before the Catholic Church started running
the risk of closing down and the Western world became increasingly secularized,
a period in which popes were dying in rather mysterious circumstances and the
sketchy Cardinal Marcinkus was disposing
of money (and probably people) with impressively suspicious nonchalance. The
tension throughout the book is palpable, and it is alienating in a way that
very few books of a hundred pages are.
I’d like to think that my generation fell in
love with Dan Brown only because they weren’t exposed to Sciascia.
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