Open Doors and Three Novellas - Softcover

Sciascia, Leonardo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679735615 ISBN 13: 9780679735618

Publisher: Vintage, 1993

Synopsis

“A miniature masterpiece [by] one of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century European literature.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
From one of modern Italy’s greatest writers come four flawless novellas that combine history and fiction while mapping the treacherous relations between individuals and the state. Whether set amid the paranoia of the fascist past or the criminal and political labyrinths of present-day Italy, the novellas in Open Doors are thrillers of Kafkaesque moral gravity, beautifully written and relentlessly engrossing.
 
“During the last quarter century, Sciascia has made of his curious Sicilian experience a literature that is not quite like anything else ever done by a European.”—Gore Vidal
 
“Sciascia has claimed a niche in the critical pantheon comparable to [that of] Pirandello and Borges.”—Washington Post Book World
 
“Combining fiction, historical meditation, philosophy and intellectual detective work . . . these novels [are] a poignant gleam of the elusive gold standard in literature.”—Newsday
 
“Our century’s most brilliant writer-detective.”—Village Voice

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian

From Kirkus Reviews:

Sciascia, the elegantly learned and quite politically fearless Sicilian writer who died in 1989, wrote most of his fiction in the Sixties and early Seventies; but late in his life he wrote these novellas, in which his patented interests--the law, fascism, classic French and Italian literature, metaphysics--all recombine. Best here is the title novella--a magistrate's sorrowful insistence on conscience during the Fascist period, refusing to sentence a man to death: a meditation on capital punishment, moral traduction, and cultural imprecision (``to see European history in the guise of the Russians who would like to be Germans, Germans who'd like to be French, French who would like to be half-German and half-Italian while still remaining French, Spaniards who would settle for being English if they can't be Romans, and Italians who would like to be anything and everything except Italian''). Equally interesting, and somewhat fleshier, is ``Death and the Knight''--a terminally ill police investigator's world-weary slog through lies and much more obvious (though denied) truths. Sciascia (Sicilian Uncles, etc.) here is a compiler of Stendhalian asides and ruminations rather than a narrative-maker. But these are fine literary artifacts for all that: hung upon the police-procedural framework, the cloth is rich and dark if none to form-fitting. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0679735615
• ISBN 13: 9780679735618
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304