Reading Sicily

Stephen Murray (Looking Through Taiwan) writes about some Anglophone observers of honor-bound, Mafia-ridden Sicily (Charlotte Gower Chapman, Daphne Phelps, Mary Taylor Simeti, Lawrence Durrell, Tariq Ali. and Peter Robb) before delving into novels (and plays and some other inquiries) by Sicilian authors, most extensively the multiple works of Luigi Pirandello and Leonardo Sciascia, along with novels by Giovanni Verga, Federico De Roberto, Elio Vittorini, Vitalio Brancati, Livia De Stefani, Giuseppe Tomassso di Lampedusa, Fortunato Pasqualino, Giuseppe Bonaviri, Gesualdo Bufalino, Vincenzo Consolo, and Dacia Maraini. This is followed by discussion of what Murray regards as the seventeen essential films set and/or shot in Sicily, and suggestions for further reading about Sicily and the major writers born and raised there (many of whom moved to the Italian peninsula and looked back from Rome or Milan). The failure of aspirations for Sicily of the Risorgimento, what Gramsci called the “passive revolution,” is a particular focus of the Sicilian literature and, therefore, of the discussion of Sicilian literature here.