New York Review Books Classics
3 total works
This is a short, powerful novel dealing with the complicities and accomodations of power within Italian politics.
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.
On March 16 1978, Also Moro, former Italian Prime Minister, was ambushed in Rome. Within three minutes the gang killed all five members of his escort and bundled Moro inot one of three getaway cars. An hour later the Red Brigades announced that Moro was in their hands; on March 18 they said he would be tried in a "people's court of justice". Seven weeks later Moro's body was discovered in the boot of a Renault parked in the crowded centre of Rome. In this book, Leonardo Sciasica, a master of detective fiction, untangles the real-life events of these crucial weeks and provides a unique insight into the dangerous world of Italian politics in the 1970s