SSI - Italy - Leonardo Sciascia
End Game
“Judging from the position I am in at the moment, he must be an idiot”
Born in Sicily, in 1921, Leonardo Sciascia is on of Italy’s outstanding writers. His work covers short stories, novels, essays and plays, but he is best known for his sophisticated mysteries concerned with the complex crimes of governments.
Luigi Barzini1 has written of him: “He is something more than one of Europe’s great contemporary writers…. He is also the very rare thing, a moral teacher….a poet at heart, a great novelist, and a compassionate but cruel lover of his people and his Island.”
I will try to keep all of my short story international experiences spoiler free so you can go and grab a copy of the books for yourself and enjoy them, to be honest with you and myself i don’t think i have ever had the knack for reading international literature be it novels or novella’s and this is also my fist encounter of an Italian author which i can his myself reading more of in the future.
End Game was a thrilling, burning short story giving insights and highlight the contemporary issues that persist till this day, breaking down the story into a lot of different parts one can find many metaphors and underlying messages.
The story starts out by putting us (the reader) somewhere in the middle, which triggers somewhat of this anxiety and curiosity to understand what the heck is going on around us. Following a series of conversations and back and forth we realize that we have four character which the story revolves around.
A wife of a very rich and successful man gets a visit from an unnamed guest, they have a series of conversations, in which we get the gist of the story. Through the recollections we learn that our unnamed guest is their to get rid of the wife sent by the husband, but she already knows that and is well prepared…. what happens after that you go read and find out for yourself.
The way the story is told in such a limited amount of time and the way we all feel the mystery unfolding in front of our eyes and yet not knowing what this all mess would wind up to, is what makes this story beautiful.
Be it standing in a line, waiting for something I would definitely recommend you to read “End Game by Leonardo Sciascia”.
some things that caught my eye …
“My father, who was petit-bourgeois, lived in rented apartments all his life and never felt the need to own his own home. Today there’s not a Marxist who doesn’t want to own property, who won’t saddle himself with debts for the sake of buying his own home. The concepts of eternity and of hell have shrunk to the dimensions of the mortgage repayable over twenty-five years. It’s the banks that dispense metaphysics”
“Your idea about self-made men comes straight out of romantic fiction or American manuals on ‘How to Succeed’. But I can assure you, from my knowledge not only of my husband but of a fairly large number of ‘Self-made men’ that they have without exception been ‘made’ by other people, who in their turn have been ‘made by a set of circumstances, coincidences and sordid little deals that, even if the result seems a story-book success, remains fortuitous and meretricious”