City Travel Guides
Home Page > Go back a page
Books : The Wine Dark Sea
Search Books - select a category
See Larger Image |
The Wine Dark Sea by: Leonardo Sciascia List Price: £7.99 City Travel Guides Price: £5.99 You Save: £2.00 (25%)Prices subject to change. |
|
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 813 EAN: 9781862074149 ISBN: 1862074143 Label: Granta Books Manufacturer: Granta Books Number Of Pages: 272 Publication Date: April 10, 2001 Publisher: Granta Books Studio: Granta Books Sales Rank: 65826 Related Items:
Related Items:      see moreBrowse for similar items by category:
Editorial Review: Amazon.co.uk 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 |
|