The day of the owl (novel)

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The day of the owl (Italian original title: Il giorno della civetta ) is a detective novel by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia from 1961. It is considered the first literary treatment of the Mafia and made its author famous. The German translation by Arianna Giachi was published by Walter Verlag in 1964 . In 1968 a film adaptation of the same name by Damiano Damiani was released in cinemas.

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A man is shot dead on the street in the Sicilian village of S. It is Salvatore Colasberna, the co-founder of a local building cooperative. Nobody, interviewed Capitano Bellodi, a northern Italian from Parma with an unusually polite manner for the Carabinieri , wants to have seen anything. Only an anonymous letter reveals that Colasberna was threatened by the mafia because he refused to pay protection money. When tree cutter Paolo Nicolosi, who was betrayed by his wife, goes missing, the Sicilian public is only too happy to accept a passionate crime . Only Capitano Bellodi recognizes the connection between the two cases, because Nicolosi had recognized the murderer Colasbernas and called "Zicchinetta" by his nickname, which refers to Diego Marchica, who was recently released from prison. The police spy Calogero Dibella, known as Parrinieddu, brings two other names into play before he has to pay for his betrayal with death: Rosario Pizzuco and Don Mariano Arena, the local mafia boss.

Bellodi plays the imprisoned Marchica and Pizzuco against each other until they confess that the former was hired for the assassination attempt by the latter. The real Hintermann Arena, however, is unimpressed by his arrest, as he is networked in the highest circles of Italian politics. After all, he recognizes his opponent Bellodi as “people”, an honor that he only bestows on a few - and none of the murdered. Although his connection with Minister Mancuso caused a brief political scandal in Rome , it was put down just as quickly as Bellodi's investigations. Hastily summoned witnesses with an impeccable reputation provide Diego Marchica with a watertight alibi, whereupon the rest of the investigation collapses. The tree cutter's death is blamed on his wife and her lover - the popular crime of passion that explains everything - and the mafia is officially relegated to the realm of legend.

Capitano Bellodi, who has been sent to Bologna for a trial , only follows the crackdown on his case in the press. He simulates an illness so as not to have to return to Sicily. But when his reports of experiences in his friends in Parma do not cause horror, but rather a cozy, romantic shiver, he too feels that he has learned to love Sicily. He will return to the island again, even if he runs his head on it.

title

The owl that gives the title arouses a number of associations in the German-speaking world, from a symbol for wisdom and science to the phrase “ carry owls to Athens ” to the screeching owl as a harbinger of impending danger. The preceding motto "... just like the owl by day" refers to a passage from Shakespeare's drama Heinrich VI. In which it says in detail: "And whoever does not want to fight for such a hope, / Go home to bed, like the owl during the day / When you get up then mocked and amazed!" So whoever refuses to fight for lofty goals should be mocked become like an owl. The “day of the owl” is a reality that the sleeping owl has not noticed and which has long since become normality and is denounced by its title and motto.

analysis

The narrow book Der Tag der Eule , classified by the author himself as a short story , was, according to Manfred Hardt Sciascias, "a real literary debut" and made its author famous , despite some previously published works . Sciascia was soon recognized as the greatest living Sicilian writer and a "conscience of Italian society" who raised its voice in many of the country's cultural and political debates. The book brought the problem of the Mafia beyond the borders of Italy into public awareness and is considered to be the first literary treatment of the Mafia. Lothar Müller sees it as the "archetype of all mafia crime novels". The following year the first parliamentary commission of inquiry into the mafia was held, and ministers with mafia relationships, which Sciascia had already sketched out, did not become public until much later. Prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa , murdered in 1982, reminds us of Capitano Bellodi in his fight against the Mafia and his northern Italian origins.

The opening scene of The Day of the Owl shows a technique that many of Sciascia's novels are based on: the "centrifugality of reality". After the murder, witnesses, clues and traces strive centrifugally in all directions. The investigator, who fights for his conviction of justice and law, tries - ultimately in vain - centripetally to return them to their starting point in order to solve the crime. According to Maike Albath , Sciascia investigates "the connections between mentality and mafia behavior" in the day of the owl . In his investigations, Capitano Bellodi encounters omertà , the duty of secrecy. Hailing from the north, like the Italian state as a whole, he is a stranger to Sicilian society. Although he can solve the crime, it remains a “powerless clarification” that does not result in conviction. Only the reader knows the perpetrators, and in him has established the certainty that the Mafia is not just an invention of the Italian north, as consistently asserted in the novel, but exists in reality.

For Der Spiegel , the author in Der Tag der Owl sneaks over "the back stairs of the crime novel [...] into the good room of literature". The "dry and cheerful serenity" of his story does not hide his social criticism and his commitment. According to Lothar Müller, Sciascia has interwoven "the illusionary games of pirandels and the labyrinths of Borges " in his novel. Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus understands the missing happy ending as a narrative criticism of the genre classics Hammett and Chandler : In a system in which organized crime has become part of the social order, a return to order at the end of the novel must be a return to crime be. The detective has thus been given a tragic role: he is no longer in the service of order, but rather disrupts it and must be eliminated. Unlike the detective characters in Sciascia's later works, Bellodi remains alive in The Day of the Owl , but not only is he deprived of all control over his investigations, but also relegated to the realm of fiction. According to Gudrun Dietz, the novel paints “a fatalistic, omnipotent picture of the Mafia”.

expenditure

  • Leonardo Sciascia: Il giorno della civetta . Einaudi, Turin 1961.
  • Leonardo Sciascia: The Day of the Owl . German by Arianna Giachi. Walter, Olten 1964.
  • Leonardo Sciascia: The Day of the Owl . German by Arianna Giachi. dtv, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-423-10731-6 .
  • Leonardo Sciascia: The Day of the Owl . Translated from the Italian by Arianna Giachi. Wagenbach, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-8031-2619-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Kraus: Additions to Leonardo Sciascia: The day of the owl . At lesekost.de.
  2. ↑ William Shakespeare: King Heinrich VI., Part Three, Act Fifth, Scene Four In the transmission by August Wilhelm Schlegel .
  3. ↑ Gabriele Vickermann: The slightly different detective novel. Italian studies on the boundaries of genre and genre . C. Winter, Heidelberg 1998, ISBN 3-8253-0816-2 , p. 184.
  4. ^ A b Manfred Hardt : Not only against the Mafia . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of November 23, 1998.
  5. ↑ a b Maike Albath : The godfather and no end . In: Deutschlandfunk from May 24, 2008.
  6. ↑ a b c Lothar Müller : Leonardo Sciascia: "The Day of the Owl" . In: Der Standard from May 4, 2006.
  7. ↑ Leonardo Sciascia: "The Day of the Owl" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1964, pp. 137 ( online ).
  8. ^ Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus : Detective novel and post-avant-garde . Originally in: Merkur , 41st year, issue 458, April 1987, pp. 287–296.
  9. ^ The Mafia is a phenomenon that has been transfigured by the media . Announcement of Gudrun Dietz's dissertation at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn on April 3, 2007.