The Day of the Owl (Paladin Books) (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leonardo Sciascia

A. Colquhoun (Translator) and A. Oliver (Translator)

This short novel about the mafia is also a mesmerizing demonstration of how that organization sustains itself. It is both a beautifully written story and a brave act of denunciation. A dark-suited man is shot as he runs for a bus in the piazza of a small town. The investigating officer is a man who believes in the values of a democratic and modern society, and soon finds himself up against a wall of silence and vested interests. The narrative moves on two levels: that of the investigator, who reveals a chain of nasty crimes; and that of the bystanders and watchers, of those complicit with secret power, whose gossipy furtive conversations have only one end: to stop the truth coming out.

• ISBN10: 0586086005
• ISBN13: 9780586086001
• Publish Date: 25 June 1987
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 9 November 1995
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Paladin
• Edition: New edition
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 132
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

4.5*

Mainlanders are decent enough but just don’t understand things.

I came across Sciascia when browsing through the Sicily travel guide last week, which recommended The Day of the Owl (alongside Lampedusa's The Leopard) as quintessential Sicilian reads.

The Day of the Owl begins with a murder that takes places in broad daylight in a town square. There is an abundance of witnesses but nobody claims to have seen anything or know anything significant that could lead the police to the killer.
And so the investigation, led by a "Northerner", begins to unravel the complicated net of obligation, honor, and lies that surrounds the killing and tries to describe the organisation of the mafia, at a time when its existence was still being denied and kept out of public view.

Sciascia wrote this in 1961 (8 years before Puzo would publish The Godfather), and although the novella is only 100+ pages in length, it has the depth of a full length novel, and leaves behind an unsettling notion of how big an influence the organisation must have had (or still has?) on the lives of people who are surrounded by the web of silence and obligations.

This was a fascinating read.