A Sciascia paperback, The Wine-Dark Sea turned up in my dad’s bookshop a decade or so ago, among the boxes salvaged from a house clearance in the part of France where my dad now lives. The Homeric title and Sicilian setting were enough to get me to start leafing through. There are few greater pleasures in reading, in the search for literature in whatever new form it might be hiding, than the bolt from the blue, of picking up something unknown and realising, after a few pages, then a few more, this is it. In Sciascia, the dark force that lurks behind language has a material, even brutal presence. His stories, even the ones without any violence, are like crimes in which the satisfaction offered by successful detection is precluded from the outset.
“‘Do you think it comes from the Arabic?’
‘Very likely, my friend, very likely…But the study of words is far from being an exact science.’”
In ‘Philology’, two men discuss the origins of the word mafia. It quickly becomes clear than one is a mafia boss and the other his associate. I say nothing more, for fear of giving too much away. Everyone in Sciascia’s fiction knows when to shut up, or should do.
First published as part of the collection Il mare colore del vino, Adelphi, 1973; English translation The Wine-Dark Sea, Granta, 2001
A Personal Anthology 