Sciascia Leonardo — The Day of the Owl [14]

Unlike most of Sciascia’s victims, the contractor Salvatore Colasberna is neither bad nor even merely innocent but actually brave and upstanding. He refuses the Mafia’s demands not from greed or foolhardiness but because he wants to compete fairly, pay his workers decently, and do a solid job. He is that freak of nature, an honest Sicilian. So of course he must be killed off on the first page, struck down while stepping onto a bus by an “invisible hand.” “They’ve killed him,” the bus conductor announces; and that characteristic “they” registers Sicilian malignity as pervasive and anonymous. — Sciascia Leonardo, The Day of the Owl, 14

Note

The ironic precision of ‘that freak of nature, an honest Sicilian’ and the way ‘they’ve killed him’ — with its ominous anonymous plural — captures the book’s central conceit about pervasive, nameless malignity.