The Wine-dark Sea (Paladin Books) - Softcover

Sciascia, Leonardo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586086595 ISBN 13: 9780586086599

Publisher: Paladin, 1988

Synopsis

Leonardo Sciascia was an outstanding and controversial presence in twentieth-century Italian literary and intellectual life. Writing about his native Sicily and its culture of secrecy and suspicion, Sciascia matched sympathy with skepticism, unflinching intelligence with a streetfighter's intransigent poise. Sciascia was particularly admired for his short stories, and The Wine-Dark Sea offers what he considered his best work in the genre: thirteen spare and trenchant miniatures that range in subject from village idiots to mafia dons, marital spats to American dreams. Here, in unforgettable form, Sciascia examines the contradictions--sometimes comic, sometimes deadly, and sometimes both--of Sicily's turbulent history and day-to-day life.

About this title

Review:

A novelist, polemicist, occasional politician, and perennial nominee for the Nobel Prize, Leonardo Sciascia died in 1989. He left behind a formidable array of books, all of which revolve around the hallucinatory realities of Sicilian life. But the stories collected in The Wine-Dark Sea may be the best introduction to his work. They offer a kind of capsule-history of Sicily, ranging through several hundred years and engaging the country's events from their exhilarating and terrible underside. A good comparison might be the naif's-eye view of Waterloo that Stendhal creates in The Charterhouse of Parma. (Sciascia recalls Stendhal in other ways, too; he shares the same adamant clarity, the same bone-dry wit, which may explain why he's always been a hard sell in the United States.)

These tales all have a certain riddling quality, whether they're providing a nugget of Sicilian history or staging one of Sciascia's many comedies of ironic disillusionment. The superb title story is about the bottomless chasm separating Sicilians and outsiders, bridged only temporarily by a group of strangers travelling from Rome to Agrigento. "Philology," the closest thing to a classic Pirandellian exercise, lets us eavesdrop on two mafiosi cramming for an upcoming session with a Commission of Enquiry. The subject: how to answer the question, "What is the Mafia?" They consult a battery of dictionaries, arguing about the merits of various definitions and etymologies. We are left, in the end, with this reply: "Culture, my friend, is a wonderful thing." So too is fiction, at least in Sciascia's hands. He offers little in the way of certainty, but his questions, posed with deadly accuracy, are worth the answers of a dozen other authors. --James Marcus, Amazon.com

From the Publisher:

Media Reviews
‘Few writers managed to capture the taciturn Sicilian character better than Sciascia, who always understood the power of implication in his work. [A] superb collection’ The Times

‘There are 13 stories in The Wine-Dark Sea.. I guarantee you will wish there were more’ Big Issue in the North

‘Granta Books are to be congratulated on making available again in English one of Europe’s most challenging twentieth-century writers’ TLS

About this edition

• Publisher: Paladin
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0586086595
• ISBN 13: 9780586086599
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144