Sicily — On Reading

I find a bookstore on the street beside mine. It is hidden beside a high school, only a few steps away from the sea. Inside books are stacked on the floor and spill out of the shelves. I’m not surprised that this place operates like everything else Sicilian; there is no order here, only enthusiasm.

An elderly couple runs the bookstore and the woman pats my back when I enter. She tells me something I don’t understand but her smile is wide so I nod like I do. When I ask her for a recommendation - “I’m looking for something easy to read in Italian” - she disappears into the back room, returning seconds later with an armload of books. I can only imagine how long it will take me to read the back cover on one of those books, never mind all three of them.

She’s given me one novel of Verga’s and two of Sciascia’s - books written by two of the most famous Italian writers, books already difficult to process in translation, books infinitely more complex in their original language.

I’ve only read one Sciascia before. Last year, when my thesis advisor assigned The Wine-Dark Sea, I loved Sciascia’s stories and prose and structure. But what I remember six months later is how Sciascia brought Sicily to life so even in the dead of winter, in the middle of New Hampshire, I could escape to the island and immerse myself in the world I now get to find bookshops within. Reading is universal in how it not only translates languages but in how it translates places so experiences, memories, and landscapes can be shared. When it left the sea and came to the woods, Sicily met me on the page, and now that I’m here, those same stories have returned to me. The words are the exact same but the context has been displaced by 4,000 miles.

I want to tell the elderly man my thoughts on the book but I pronounce the collection as “Il Mare e Vino” - the sea and wine - so it takes a moment before he and his wife understand what I’m talking about. When they do, the man overviews the two Sciascia’s his wife has brought to me and I gather that both have something to do with the mafia. When I simplify the elderly man’s overview by referring to Sciascia as the mafia writer, he cringes even though Sciascia is known as such.

I think about his response as I peruse the books because while we don’t share a language, stories should be universal. We respond to the same characters. We feel the same emotions written on the page only they’re written with different words that make different sounds that mean the same thing. Fiction is a universal form of communication; writing bonds us across cultures and continents.

But when I picture the man reading The Wine-Dark Sea, he is reading it at the sea, on the island, with the knowledge of all that led Sciascia to write. To him, Sciascia doesn’t write about fiction but about real things and while Sciascia’s stories are universally translatable, the affects of those stories are simultaneously collective and individualized. The same words have the power to reach anybody - the author’s intent is even across each edition of his novel - but the way those words impact the reader opens us up to our own experiences within a shared framework.

As we read in a given context, the man rejects my simplification about Sciascia as the mafia writer because the mafia, to him, goes beyond the fiction I’ve read. He lives in Palermo, a city tainted by the mafia. Right outside the walls of that bookshop I passed a mural of the judges Falcone and Borsellino. They are the two judges murdered for their roles in the mafia trials, proclaimed heroes to the city of Palermo in standing up to organized crime. The book clerk therefore does not read Sciascia to escape to Sicily like I did but rather reads with a critical eye and an understanding of where the writer is coming from. Perhaps that makes the mere act of reading something of the uncanny; we read the same books but discrepancies in personal experience, however subtle, render our reading experiences inherently varied.

I buy all three novels for 10 euro and read a few sentences then and now. Reading in Italian has made me linger on words I would normally skip past so I’m forced to digest the stories like I digest this island. Having to mentally translate every word the author has chosen, I’ve not only slowed down to savor the story but allowed the story to become new in ways beyond language. I no longer need to travel across the ocean to the place on the page. Sciascia has come alive in ways beyond his descriptions.