Books in the city

Before leaving the books of Sicily behind I have to confess to Jo, who sent me an email on the day I posted the question “What is the great Sicilian Novel?” saying “Something to do with a large spotted cat?”, and to everyone else who was following the story, that there was a catch.  The leopard is a great Sicilian novel, maybe the greatest, but not the Great Sicilian Novel, to my eyes. The idea of a great national novel – and yes, it is a bit of a game – is that it captures the spirit of a people, being written in their voice. Americans usually put forth Huckleberry Finn for theirs, although I’ve always leaned towards The sound and the fury myself.  The leopard, as grand and tragic as you will, remains one man’s story, at the most one class’s story, and the story is one of abdication: “We were the leopard, the lions, and after us will come the jackals, the hyenas.”

Leonardo Sciascia is the writer you want to read if you want sicilianita’, as he called it, Sicilianness, life with the jackals. “All my books, in effect, constitute one book,” he wrote in a preface to one of them.  “A book on Sicily that touches the sore spots of the past and the present and that unfolds as the continuous defeat of reason.” Especially for naming the Mafia as Sicily’s sore spot of the present, he was disliked by many Sicilians, who were forever claiming that the Mafia didn't exist or existed but not here.

His tired, bitter and insightful story The wine-dark sea nails this phenomenon in a few lines exchanged between an engineer heading to Sicily for work and a Sicilian sharing his train compartment. The Sicilian is extolling the virtues of his home town and has just lost his temper with his son who says the Sicilian ocean is the colour of wine. What is the matter with you, the father says. You know it’s blue. The son continues obstinately to claim it looks like wine, and then that it is wine. His parents are furious.  And then,

“Is there a local Mafia?” asked Bianchi.
“Mafia?” exclaimed Micchiche’ with the same incredulity he would have displayed had he been asked whether the inhabitants of Nisima had webbed feet. “What Mafia? All nonsense!”

The day of the owl could be my nomination for Great Sicilian Novel. This book, which our cousin visiting from Rome told me today she listened to being read aloud just last week on their equivalent of National Radio, and found it as bellissimo as ever, is a detective story, as many of Sciascia's novels were. He loved the mystery genre, and his novels - and the movies which some of Italy's best film directors made from them - are full of suspense and sharp images.

One of the most striking scenes in The day of the owl is the one when a group of illiterate brothers are called before the enlightened, Voltaire-reading carabiniere officer, Captain Bellodi, to testify about a Mafia murder.  For them it means confronting "the terror of a merciless inquisition, of the black seed of the written word. 'White soil, black seed. Beware of the man who sows it. He never forgets' says the proverb." 

For Sciascia, this is the key difference:  the laws of the State are written, and permanent; by contrast, the mafia is only an oral culture and its "rules" - like vendetta, omerta' (the code of silence) etc - are just behaviours, passed down by word of mouth. "They behave like animals" he said, "erasing their footprints in front of their lairs."

And so they do. I have a terrible memory of a night when the Mafia exploded a car bomb ten blocks from my house, when I was living in Florence. It was meant to blow up the Uffizi Gallery, but they weren't able to park it close enough for some reason which I can't remember now, so that it only managed to damage the Gallery. It did, however, kill a family in a ground floor apartment close by, including two small children. The ground floor apartments are always where the portiere, or building caretaker lives. Although in some more pretentious neighborhoods there are portieri who spend all day polishing their cars and sticking their noses into everyone's business, in those tiny medieval streets of the old centre it's just a regular old workingman job.
We heard the explosion and went tearing out to see what it was, and if we could help. It was the middle of the night and there was no one about but I caught sight of one man walking hurriedly in the opposite direction. A second later we hit Via dei Georgofili and saw the glass all over the cobblestones and people carrying bleeding people out the door. We didn't know if it was a gas main or what, we only found out the next morning that it was a bomb. Everyone knew it meant mafia. And that was when I thought of the weaselly little guy I had seen going in the wrong direction. What I kept remembering, and what I still remember, is that he was, not quite, but sort of, smiling as he walked. 
 
In the preface to Salt in the wound, his early book written when he was not yet famous about the year he spent as a school teacher in his home town, Sciascia recalled how the people there used to say to him "It takes just a stroke of the pen" as if they were saying "It takes just a stroke of the sword". He adds

"I would dearly love to have the strength to mete out some resounding strokes of the pen on behalf of the salt miners of Regalpetra, of the peasants, of the old people without pensions, of the children who are sent out to work. Of course like the poor of Regalpetra, I too have some faith in the power of writing."
 

Someone asked me about the line in my last post about sitting next to Giorgio Bassani, the author of The garden of the Finzi-Continis, on a bus. It wasn't meant to be cryptic. It was a conscious effort to avoid one of those infinite tangents that calculus and I am prone to. But having resisted once, I am happy now to share the story.

We were on our way to a conference about the need to defend European culture against American hegemony.  He was one of the great names (another was Anthony Burgess, whom I remember circling in an apparently alcohol-induced buzz, a head taller than everyone else, with a red face and eyes that really were "like infected buttonholes I dare not meet in dreams" as Gore Vidal had viciously but funnily described them)  and  I was just a hostess - as in glorified secretary, not as in geisha - and an interloper as well, being American, but  it seemed clear to me that the air of distance which he wore about him like a wisp of Po River valley fog  was not from snobbery.    

Years later,  I opened the paper one day to find a terrible story about how his wife, with whom he hadn't lived for 30 years, was suing in court to take over his financial affairs because, she said, he had Alzheimer's and his companion was squandering his money. For her the defining moment of this financial mismanagement was when he and his companion -- an American professor with whom he had been living in Rome for 20 odd years – had sold his family home in Ferrara. 

Me, I  prefer to think that they were simply turning the stones into something which at that point he needed more. Care, perhaps, or concert tickets (he was a fine pianist who, like Anthony Burgess, had considered music as a career before literature), maybe out of season fruit or even fine whiskey, of which, according to his companion, he enjoyed "one or two fingers" every night before dinner, always bringing it to the table when it was two.  Dementia sufferers travel light.

And anyway those stones of Ferrara will always be his, because of his books, all set among them, all in the same pre-World War II era, that is to say, under the shadow of fascism. In The Garden of the Finzi-Continis there is the stone wall which the narrator , who is pretty much Bassani, remembers climbing over as a boy to see the object of his desire, the beautiful, rich, sophisticated Micol, for whom none of these attributes will be of any use when one more attribute, Jewish, turns out to be enough for the Fascist racial laws. Neither of course is the wall around what they thought was their enchanted garden of any use. One out of three people in the Jewish community  Bassani grew up in were deported under Nazifascism, about 100 people, and of those, 5 came back. 

Giorgio Bassani liked this entry in Henry James's Notebooks: "Why does my pen not drop from my hand on approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past? It does, poor helpless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable, what it meets of the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life lived, on every side.”

A Dutch photographer named Susanne Stoop has made a beautiful book of photos called "The Ferrara streetbook: a walk in Giorgio Bassani's footsteps" with the creative publishing company "Blurb". Follow this link to leaf through a digital copy of the book.
www.blurb.com/books/471228

 

The leopard, written by the Sicilian prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa almost exactly fifty years ago, is usually considered the greatest Sicilian novel. As often happens to me with great books, it is hard to choose what to say it’s about. I might do as the book does and say, the Leopard, or, Prince Fabrizio of Salina. Based by Tomasi on his great-grandfather, the Prince is an autocratic giant who bends silverware with his hands when he is angry without realising it, a lover of novels, and an amateur astronomer who, when he once discovered two small planets, named one for his estate and the other for his favourite hunting dog.
 
As the book opens, Garibaldi has landed in Sicily and the House of Bourbon, which rules Naples and Sicily, is tumbling down. The Prince, with his intelligence and his energy which "tends toward abstraction", as one of the characters notes, sees clearly that a whole way of life is dying, but is incapable or unwilling to do anything about it. “One of the world’s great lonely books” EM Forster called this book, and it is. All through the book, its wonderful, lyrical descriptions of Sicily's landscapes and rituals, its funny passages and its acute observations of human nature, the “sediment of sorrow” building in the old prince is a constant refrain.

Many people know about the book from the great movie Luchino Visconti made of it, which the library just recently purchased on DVD (my suggestion!). I took it home as soon as it arrived and watched it. It had aged well, maybe because it is very staged, very magnificent, like one of his opera productions -- 'natural' goes out of date very quickly, but rich and choreographed keeps its spell. Claudia Cardinale is as beautiful as I remembered as the alluring daughter the proto-Mafioso barters for power, but how did I forget how stunning Burt Lancaster was as the Prince?

The leopard was Tomasi di Lampedusa’s one book. He wrote it in only a few months but, his wife recounted after he died, he had been thinking about it for 25 years. It was learning he was terminally ill that decided him; he was able to just finish the fair copy and to have it rejected as unpublishable by the two major Italian publishing houses before he died.  This last bit, which I learned today from the back cover flap of one of the three copies of The leopard we have in the fantastic Central Library basement, seems unbearably sad.

I also learned, this from the translator's preface, that when it did get published, by Feltrinelli in 1958 --  which would make it the same year they published Dr. Zhivago --  it was Giorgio Bassani, then an editor there, who chose the manuscript. Giorgio Bassani was from a Jewish family of Ferrara, the beautiful Renaissance city on the Po river delta in northern Italy, about as far and as different from Sicily as you can get. He later became a famous writer himself with The garden of the Finzi-Contini, The heron, and other books, and once he sat next to me on a bus, kind and distant, wearing a hat and elegant belted coat.

The leopard was a bestseller and went on to be recognised as one of the greatest novels of 20th century European literature. Oh, and the other two copies in the Library basement stacks were both out.