Friends for faraway places
Take
Alexandre Dumas to Paris, read Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, pack Michael Dibdin
for Sicily - wherever you are going on holiday this summer, writers recommend
the perfect literary travelling companions
The Guardian, Saturday June 14 2008
San Domenico Church in Palermo.
Julian Barnes recommends Norman Lewis’s The Honoured Society for traveller to Sicily. Photograph: David Levene
Julian Barnes
Sicily
Walking through Sicily this
spring from Enna to Cefalu was enhanced by a lucky choice of reading: Goethe,
Michael Dibdin and Norman Lewis. Lewis's The Honoured Society (Eland) is a
classic account of the Sicilian mafia, that murderous exploiter initially
formed to protect the exploited. One of its grimmer side-stories has a queasy
contemporary parallel: in 1943 the Americans, to speed their invasion of the
island, reinstalled and relegitimised the criminal gangs that had been more or
less broken by Mussolini in the late 1920s. Easy conquest, disastrous
reconstruction: the echos of Iraq are thunderous.
Dibdin's Blood Rain (Faber) feels
indebted in part to Lewis for its historical background. There is a suspicion
in the first half of the book that Dibdin is getting a little weary of his
Inspector Zen, and an even bigger suspicion at the end (no, I'd better not
spoil it); but the action and sense of place are as satisfyingly rich as in any
of the series with which the author anatomised modern Italy.
It was odd to turn to Goethe's
Italian Journey (Penguin Classics) almost for light relief - or at least a
change of mood. And if some of the silent, scrutinising faces glimpsed in
narrow village streets could have come straight from Lewis's illustrations, or
Dibdin's text, the landscapes between the villages were still very much as
Goethe had described them: groves of head-high wild fennel, aloes, asphodels,
amaranthine clover, orchids, wild peonies. Goethe was a tourist as we were (he had
a memorably bad time in Enna), but his engagement with every aspect of life -
from the high aesthetics of accurately rendering maritime moonscapes to the
daily practicalities of macaroni-twisting - is simply inspiring. As is one of
his conclusions: "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to
have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/14/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview
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