

Those who prefer something gentler will relish Alessandro Baricco, who is beginning to command a following in Britain. Simona Vinci does not number herself with the Cannibals, but there is a repulsive violence in A Game We Play (Weidenfeld), which focuses on the sexuality of children. Enrico Brizzi set the tone with Jack Frusciante Has Left the Band. There are younger contemporaries who proudly group themselves together under the title The Cannibals, and who appeal, like Irvine Welsh in Britain, to a supposedly anarchic, iconoclastic youth. Night of the Comet retells the tragic story of the poet, Dino Campana, from Northern Italy, while Vassalli had the courage, or foolhardiness, to choose Sicily as the setting of The Swan (Carcanet), a historical novel dealing with a mafia murder in the 19th century. The most "Italian" of writers, in the sense of the one who refuses association with one region, is probably Sebastiano Vassalli, from Novara. Both Joyce and Svevo have walk-on parts, but the most representative character is the man who loves Trieste "because he had the impression of being nowhere". His best book remains Danube, but if that is not suitable reading for an Italian excursion, his more recent Microcosms (Harvill) should pass muster.

Magris is a writer of some imaginative and intellectual scope. James Joyce lived in Trieste, and there he met up with Italo Svevo, author of Confessions of Zeno. Novels like The Day of the Owl or To Each His Own focus on a local mafia in Sicily, but the later Equal Danger (all Carcanet) deals with a new, globalised criminal force that operates in boardrooms and inside ministries.Ĭlaudio Magris, meanwhile, lives at the opposite end of the Italian peninsula from Sicily, but he shows the same attachment to his own place, Trieste. Sciascia entrusts his investigations to a series of low-ranking police officers, who find themselves crushed between criminals and corrupt servants of the state. The master of sophisticated detective fiction remains Leonardo Sciascia, whose novels are an extended investigation into what it means to be Sicilian. Montalbano's investigations are liable to be disturbed by a good restaurant or by a favourite traditional dish cooked by some witness to a crime. He writes in a mixture of standard Italian and Sicilian, and - in an explicit act of homage to the Catalan writer Vazquez Montalban - his detective is called Montalbano. This is very much the case with Andrea Camilleri, the Sicilian detective-story writer who has dominated the bestseller lists in Italy in recent years.

The Sicilian tradition has the robust autonomy of Irish literature, and the same willingness to draw nourishment from non-mainstream cultures.
