Chronicle of Tragedies Foretold?

were over 90 years old and both were from the Italian South, which is supposedly backward and less civilised than the North. Luciano de Crescenzo was a Neapolitan engineer who, somewhat late in life, became a philosopher-novelist. His most famous novel is Così parlò Bellavista (obviously a pun on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and when it was published in 1977, it sold more than 600,000 copies. In it, the protagonist – a retired philosophy teacher – explains the difference between the Love Peoples (Italians, Spaniards, Poles, Irish, Greeks) and the Freedom Peoples (Britons, Scandinavians, Germans) and those in-between. But he also speaks of the difference between the Stoics and the Epicureans.

The Stoics are those who are ready to forgo pride and pleasure because they believe in something bigger than themselves. The Christians, for instance, are Stoics because they believe in eternal happiness and are therefore ready to suffer on this earth to acquire happiness in the next. The Epicureans are those who seek pleasures in the here and now.

To my mind, de Crescenzo’s explanation of this categorisation applies to politicians. The Stoic politician applies self-abnegation because s/he is a wo/man of State and the interests of the State inspire his/her actions. The Epicurean politician could not care less, and thinks only of how occupying a State office can serve his/her own ambition, be it political, financial, or God knows what else (remember, only two things are infinite: the universe and human imagination, be it intelligent or stupid).

By applying this categorisation, we understand that we are currently ruled by an Epicurean, for whom instant gratification is more important than long-term planning. We can clearly identify the ingredients of tragedies foretold. Indeed, all tragedies are foretold – it only takes men and women endowed with judiciousness, whose judgment is not shallow, to read the signs. It then takes men and women of courage to act on those signs, even if in the short term they might encounter the backlash of unpopularity. But he feels the need for popularity more than the need to do the right thing. The real tragedy is that the price will be paid by the nation, not by him.

All tragedies are foretold. Do you remember the Genoa bridge that collapsed last year? An inquiry has now established that safety problems had been apparent for at least the last 10 years before the disaster. Did anybody do anything about them? No. The tragedy – unlike the concrete of the bridge – did not fall from the sky. It had been in the making for a number of years; people with “second sight” (the “prophets” of the past) could extrapolate from what they saw but, like all “prophets”, they were ignored. And then the tragedy that had been foretold, happened, and left 43 dead.

The country as it is being managed at the moment has all the ingredients of a tragedy foretold. When the tragedy happens, however, we will only have ourselves to blame. In the environmental sector, it is abundantly clear that it’s “abandon ship”. In the reputa

My Personal Library (57)

On Wednesday 17 July, Andrea Camilleri passed away. He was perhaps the most prolific and widely-read Italian author of the last 30 years. I had the good fortune of meeting and interviewing him 19 years ago, in his Rome apartment, upon his invitation.

I cannot here do justice to the more than 100 books he wrote and published. But I can make three observations about his work and life.

One. Many readers loved his Montalbano stories for their astute plots and insightful characterisations. I have loved Camilleri for another reason. It is not because Camilleri was highbrow literature – he was not. But his novels and short stories lend the reader – particularly if the reader is young – the vantage point of the old raconteur. Camilleri’s stories are powerful because they are distillations of memories, left to mature in the casks of old-age wisdom. In a society which reduces its old folks to recluses in homes for the elderly, a national grandfather who wants to narrate about his youth through the microphone of the wisdom that comes with old age, has necessarily to become a best-seller. To my mind, Camilleri is more of a sociological than a literary case. Very much like Bud Spencer, who fulfilled the role of father to a number of generations brought up in a fatherless society, a society seemingly made up of sons and daughters of widows. It is not just a matter of feminism. The slow disappearance of the father figure has been observed in literature, starting more or less with the beheading of the French King during the Great Revolution in France. Camilleri seems to me to have been to the Italians, and perhaps even to others, the grandfather they lacked, as everybody locks their elderly away in homes just as everybody entrusts their children to day care centres and nobody has time for family anymore. The ongoing attack on the family is dictated by the dominant mode of production, which does not need the family as economic unit to function properly.

Two. Camilleri’s historical novels, all based on or inspired by true historical events, are narrative gems. Style, characterisation, plot are handled in a masterly fashion. The theme is almost always “Sicilianity” –– sicilianità –– and mostly in the context of Sicily as part of something bigger not Sicily taken as an entity separate from any other, a “stand-alone” polity. Take his La mossa del cavallo, a veritable tour de force in psychology, a treatise in strategic thinking. It is the story of a police officer who gets arrested for a murder he was about to report to his colleagues. The central idea of the novel is that the officer was originally Sicilian but his family had moved to Genoa, and he thus needs to rediscover his roots, start thinking again in Sicilian and thus unravel the hidden threads determining his situation. In a sense it is interesting for us Maltese as we think that because we sort of communicate in English, then we sort of participate in the English world. Pure fantasy, needless to say. Then, I found Camilleri’s Il re di Girgenti to be his masterpiece –– the maestro depicts and criticises ideology (and stupidity). Yet, over the years, Camilleri too succumbed to the left-liberal ideology. I found this contradictory. In Il re di Girgenti, he criticises superstitious Christian ideology, but then he himself somewhat gave in to left-liberal ideology.

Three. Camilleri’s success came late in life. He had published his first novel in the 1970s, but made no inroads in the national book market. In the late 1990s, Camilleri benefitted from the same fortune that had shone on the brave Luciano de Crescenzo: he was endorsed by Maurizio Costanzo during his highly popular talk show and from then onward he never looked back. This says a lot about luck and perseverance, in the sense that it is perhaps never too late for Lady Luck to smile at you. Camilleri’s life-story imparts a lesson in hope, in never giving up. Then again, you have to live long enough eventually to reap the fruits of your encounter with the Lady and of your perseverance.