The broken sky

The Broken Sky is a novel by Andrea Camilleri , first published in 2003 (title of the original edition: La presa di Macallè ). The German translation by Moshe Kahn was published in 2005.

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The original Italian title La presa di Macallè (The capture of Macallè) refers to a city in Abyssinia that was conquered by Mussolini's troops in the autumn of 1935 .

Michilino, the main character in the novel, is six years old at the time. He lives in Vigàta, a fictional small town in Sicily , which is based on Camilleri's hometown Porto Empedocle .

The father, a party functionary of Mussolini, cheats on his mother with a maid, who in turn betrays him with the priest. The boy, often left to his own devices, receives private lessons from a fascist who assaults him while telling him about the war virtues of the Spartans. Disturbed by the false morality of adults and influenced by Mussolini's propaganda, Michilino decides to become a soldier of the Duce. He becomes a member of a paramilitary youth organization. In the course of his development he feels more and more the desire to kill. First he satisfies his need for animals, then he stabs the son of the communist tailor to death. When he can no longer withstand the pressure of his lust for killing and his precocious sexuality on the one hand and the Christian commandments on the other, Michilino tries to kill himself. He survives and becomes his family's murderer.

Reviews

The novel is based on an autobiographical incident. At the age of ten, Camilleri wrote a letter to Mussolini in which he informed the Duce "to be ready for the fight in Africa". Seventy years later he took a critical look at fascist indoctrination, "translating the obscenity of the fascist dictatorship into sexual metaphors".

In Italy, the novel was disregarded by critics. In Germany the reviews were different. The magazine Vivere magazine said: "A novel about the devastating impact of fascist propaganda to children, the same gets stuck in the throat a grossly excessive grotesque town from Sicilia, in a laugh."

A review in the FAZ (December 2005) judged: “The fact that the explosion the book is heading towards finally sizzles out as a room fire is not due to the author's lack of narrative zeal, on the contrary, Camilleri has everything ready, gasoline, matches, bayonet and motif. But he has overdrawn the details of his story so shrilly that it becomes implausible as a whole. ... The fact that when he attacks everyday life in fascism the clichés like furniture shavings fly right and left ... doesn't seem to bother him. "