Opera aperta; Italian electronic literature from the 1960s to the present

comparable in the twentieth century only to George Orwell and Albert Camus. The aesthetic and ethical category of Candour, for example, which has its origin in Voltaire but also owes a great deal to a critical intuition of Massimo Bontempelli (who read Pirandello’s works in this key), is at the centre of his 1977 Candido. In the chapter he dedicates to this novel, one of the most acute and convincing of the entire monograph, Farrell finds a true and proper turning point that will condition Sciascia’s return to fiction in the final stages or the ‘late style’ of his works. The praise of the ‘sancta innocentia’ as an ally of the truth (p.226), the non-confessional sentiment of religiosity or spirituality that cuts through the novel, understood as adherence to a faith sui generis, ‘in the name of Life which is a formless, anarchic flux, resistant to all teleological Utopias and not reducible to any a priori scheme’ (p.238), allow Sciascia to extend his gaze onto the evil and injustice of history, on the ‘new fictional universe’ (p.251) of his last three novels published before his death, ‘to delve into mythic realms, and to debate a truth which was not exclusively the truth of society’ (p.239).