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John is currently reading

Equal Danger

by Leonardo Sciascia

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in May 2016

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John said: "

“I began to write it with amusement, and as I was finishing it I was no longer amused.” — Sciascia on Il Contesto, known in English translation by the more Ludlumesque title Equal Danger

The reader of Equal Danger should have little problem tracking

“I began to write it with amusement, and as I was finishing it I was no longer amused.” — Sciascia on Il Contesto, known in English translation by the more Ludlumesque title Equal Danger

The reader of Equal Danger should have little problem tracking the downturn of Sciasia’s mood. The novel starts almost playfully, in the mannered, essayistic style of Borges or Calvino, as Inspector Rogas methodically narrows down a field of culprits in a spree of judiciary murders. But as the Inspector settles on his prime suspect, he finds himself put upon a scent by the Powers that Be, a scent he knows to be false — an inevitability, in the Sciascia-verse, that guarantees the killings will continue unabated, and that things will likely end badly for Rogas. This also marks the moment that Equal Danger stops being a spry entertainment and becomes a dour political parable on the nature of power, corruption, complicity and silence — all the themes present in his great novels of the Sicilian mafia.

But Equal Danger is not, in any conventional sense, a mafia novel. (Neither are The Day of the Owl or To Each His Own, for that matter.) It is, rather, a novel about the mafiazation of our law-giving and -enforcing institutions in an unnamed country where lives and careers and principles are used as a sort of ideological currency to purchase political favor in a highly volatile market. (The country is imaginary, though one imagines it looks awfully like Sicily.)

Sciascia’s previous novels can seem deceptively straightforward, but Equal Danger feels altogether denser, more convoluted, claustrophobic. Allusions — to Borges and Pirandello and Chesterton and Pascal and Precopius’s Secret History among others — pile up; philosophical discourses are launched; a cat is poisoned; and in one of Sciascia’s few moments of levity, a novelist of the Old Left treats us to a hilariously rotten poem inveighing against the New Left, to whom he is hopelessly Old News. (This may count as a meta-assassination, depending on who you think Sciascia is savaging here.) It all adds up to something that feels curiously less than the sum of its parts — the opposite of how I felt at the end of, say, To Each His Own. Still, there’s a lot to be digested herein for careful readers, and the fact that a typical Sciascia novel can be read in a single sitting doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be. ...more "

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(page 27 of 119)
— Mar 22, 2026 06:22AM

Jun 07, 2016 02:01PM · see review

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Fausto & Felice Niccolini. Houses and Monuments of Pompeii

by Valentin Kockel

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(page 168 of 648)
— Feb 23, 2026 01:56AM

Feb 21, 2026 04:19AM

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Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris

by Jean Guéhenno

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(page 97 of 336)
— May 30, 2024 02:32AM

May 23, 2024 02:39AM

John’s Quotes

“It's like squeezing tripe: nothing comes out,' he said, meaning the Colasberna brothers, their partners, the town in general and Sicily as a whole.”
― Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl

tags: sicily

1 likes

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

3700 likes

“What is adolescence without trash?”
― Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honour Trilogy

7 likes

“The only institution in the Sicilian conscience that really counts is the family; counts, that is to say, more as a dramatic juridical contract or bond than as a natural association based on affection. The family is the Sicilians’ State. The State, as it is for us, is extraneous to them, merely a de facto entity based on force; an entity imposing taxes, military service, war, police. Within the family institution the Sicilian can cross the frontier of his own natural tragic solitude and fit into a communal life where relationships are governed by hair-splitting contractual ties. To ask him to cross the frontier between family and State would be too much. In imagination he may be carried away by the idea of the State and may even rise to being Prime Minister; but the precise and definite code of his rights and duties will remain within the family, whence the step towards victorious solitude is shorter.”
― Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl

4 likes

“It falls to the lot of even the most glorious flags to be thrown in the mud. Glory, what men call glory, is often thick with mud.”
― Curzio Malaparte, The Skin

tags: conquest, flags, glory

12 likes

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