Leonardo Sciascia: 'To Each His Own'

The big problem many of us have with recent political tendencies in this country and elsewhere toward what can best be described as a racially biased populism (that, in fact, favors the rich over the poor of all things), is not that we understand it, it's that we don't understand it, and so are compelled to find someone who does.

Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989), no longer with us, left us certain documents that are coming in handy now, at least to a few of us, writing as he did about the mafia and the stench therefrom. I can recommend a book of Sciascia that was recommended to me by W.S. DI Piero, a good recommendation if there ever was one for DI Piero wrote the Introduction: To Each His Own (New York Review Books, 2000).

The innocent here--a mild-mannered high-school Professor who lives with his mother--is led to the slaughter slowly, methodically, partly by his own sense of intrigue, partly by sweet nothings whispered into his ear by the murder victim's widow, and mostly by a culture that has made a practice for many years of saying one thing and meaning another, or meaning three things by saying nothing, or saying something with multiple meanings but only saying it behind your back, or saying nothing at all and instead killing you late at night and burying your body under a pile of lime.

To say the book is a murder mystery--and it is, sort of--kind of misses the point: the clue that it is not only a mystery can be found in Sciascia's choice of an epigraph, from Poe's The Murders in the Morgue: 'Let it not be supposed that I am detailing any mystery, or penning any romance.' I read it instead as a kind of primer intended to help political novices understand the great political value of collusion and deception, and how power actually conducts itself here and abroad. 

Palermo, Sicily, one of the great world cities, a place not even Mother Teresa could comfort. I walk for hours in Palermo, from places of great privilege to places of poverty and desperation, entering each seamlessly as if they are one and the same. Leonardo Sciascia was from Racalmuto on the other side of the island, and died in Palermo.