Day of the Owl [Paperback]

Leonardo Sciascia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 26, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A short novel and a brave act of denunciation by the distinguished Sicilian novelist that is a mesmerising demonstration of how that organisation sustains itself. A man is shot running for a bus in the piazza of a small town and the investigating officer finds himself up against a wall of silence. The narrative moves on two levels: that of the investigator who reveals a chain of crime; and that of the bystanders, of those complicit with secret power and who are determined to stop the truth coming out.

About the Author

Leonardo Sciascia was born in Sicily in 1912 and died there in 1989. Like Joseph Roth, Sciascia worked with deceptively simple forms - books about crime, historical novels, political thrillers - and was a master of lucid and accessible prose. This polished surface conceals great depths of sophistication and an intense engagement with the moral and historical problems of modern Italy, especially of his native Sicily. His books are rooted in a particular culture; they speak to anyone who has ever wondered how people can endure unbearable injustice.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Granta Books (April 26, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1862074186
• ISBN-13: 978-1862074187
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,496,202 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Original Mob Story, April 26, 2005

By 

Charents (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Day of the Owl (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Imagine a time before the Sopranos, before the Godfather, and before Mario Puzo. The mafia, particularly in Italy, was virtually virgin territory in literature - no one dared write about it. Leonardo Sciascia (pronounced "Sha-Sha") was one of the first to break the code of silence.

In the Day of the Owl -- a short, quick read that provides an excellent snapshot of a Sicilian village in the mid-20th century -- Sciascia transplants to unruly Sicily a northern Italian police inspector who has too much integrity to look the other way when a man is shot dead at dawn in a Siclian piazza. Witnesses quickly disavow that they saw anything at all, but rumors begin to circulate. Our hero, Captain Bellodi, is determined to see the assassin punished. But the closer he gets to the truth, the higher the intervention from "His Excellency" and other well-placed members of society.

Sciascia's genius in the Day of the Owl is his subtle description of how the "so-called" mafia manages to keep its operations quiet, ranging from eliminating those who may speak up to using faulty logic to allow for plausible deniability. Can you honestly believe, one mafiosi asks the captain, that an organization so vast, so organized and so powerful can actually exist? Would the police not be able to discover and dismantle such an organization? Would there not be public testimony in court cases? The mafia is clearly just a rumor.

Sciascia's characters are strong, particularly fish-out-of-water Bellodi. On leave in his native Parma, Bellodi considers abandoning what he fears is a futile assignment in Sicily. He quickly decides to return, recognizing that Sicily has won him over, just as the Day of the Owl will win over the reader.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Darkness at Noon, August 23, 2007

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Day of the Owl (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Leonard Sciascia's Sicily is a dark place, even while it basks under a hot noonday sun. In "The Day of the Owl", Sciascia's native Sicily (he was born in Racalmuto, Sicily in 1921) is a place where there is crime but no punishment, at least no official punishment. Sciascia's Sicily is a place where the code of silence trumps the penal code and where crimes are seen by all and witnessed by none. In Sciascia's Sicily the mafia enjoys such a symbiotic relationship with the local and federal power elite that they are effectively an independent if unacknowledged branch of government. This is not fertile ground for a detective investigating a murder but very fertile ground for a writer such as Sciascia.

"Day of the Owl" opens with a murder. A local building contractor is shot down with a sawn-off shotgun as he runs for a bus on Saturday morning. Captain Bellodi, recently arrived from the mainland, is assigned the case. Since a sawn-off shotgun is the typical instrument of mafia-ordered murders Bellodi's inclination is to look for an organized crime link. It doesn't take long for Bellodi to figure out the motive behind the murder, the identity of the murderer, and the identity of the man who ordered the murder. But knowledge alone does not equate to evidence and as the story progresses we see Bellodi painstakingly and diligently obtain the evidence necessary to indict the perpetrators. Bellodi's task is not an easy one. In addition to the wall of silence that meets him as he begins his investigation, his status as a fair-haired mainlander marks him as even more of an outsider.

Sciascia takes a multi-layered approach to telling his story. His narrative of the crime and investigation is straightforward, terse, and engaging. At the same time we are provided a glimpse into Sicily through the eyes of a newcomer, Bellodi. Bellodi the pale northerner is transformed during this book. He is at once horrified by the corruption and the code of silence that thwarts him every step of the way. At the same time we see him discover something else in this place that he finds irresistible. This evolution reaches a climax when Bellodi interrogates the mafia Don he believes to be responsible for a cold-blooded killing. There comes a point where the Don refers to Bellodi as a `real man'. There is a lot of meaning invested in that remark and Bellodi is transfixed by it. Bellodi is drawn to Sicily the way someone may be drawn to a dangerous lover. You go into the relationship knowing it will be stormy and dangerous but it is irresistible. I couldn't help but think that Bellodi and "Day of the Owl" was a great vehicle through which Sciascia could explore his own strong feelings for his native place.

Leonardo Sciascia's "Day of the Owl" is a fascinating book on many levels. It works as a good piece of detective fiction and also works well as a keen and loving (warts and all) look at life in Sicily in the 1960s. 4.5 stars. Highly recommended. L. Fleisig

If you enjoy "The Day of the Owl" you will also probably enjoy Equal Danger (New York Review Books Classics).

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Crime in the Blood, August 23, 2010

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Day of the Owl (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Leonardo Sciascia's short novel is both a crime story and more; it is also a poem of love and despair for his native Sicily. It opens with a man shot dead in a town square while running for a bus. It looks like a Mafia hit, but nobody will talk; all the potential witnesses have conveniently forgotten anything they might have seen. But Captain Bellodi, who has come down from his native Parma to take charge of the local carabinieri, soon achieves results with his unusual approach to investigation, and before long arrests three suspects, one of them a man of some prominence in the town.

These sections describing the investigation are not so different from what you would expect in any well-written police procedural, and this one is indeed well-written. But they alternate with a series of dialogues between unnamed but mostly highly-placed individuals commenting at a distance on the news coming out of Sicily about Bellodi's actions. Starting as an almost comedic device, these conversations gradually reveal the extent of the support that the Mafia enjoys, its root tendrils reaching even to the highest levels of government in Rome. The whodunnit aspect is essentially over before the halfway point in the book; the tension comes from whether Bellodi can make the charges stick, and what the nameless others can do to prevent him.

Bellodi is an unusually likeable detective, intelligent, humane, and with none of the quirks that are so often attached to his confreres in the police fiction genre. But these qualities may not be enough to combat a pattern of crime so deeply embedded in the blood and bones of Sicily. Indeed Sciascia himself, in a coda to the book, remarks that the novel he published is only a shadow of the novel he originally wrote, for fear of stirring up retaliation. "I was unable to write with that complete freedom to which every writer is entitled (and I call myself a writer only because I happen to put pen to paper)." It is neither a deep book nor especially hard-hitting, but what Sciascia wrote with that pen is eminently readable, and we can easily guess the rest.