Product Description

Developed under Sciascia's hand in the spirit of a parody, Equal Danger has come to be regarded as a wide-ranging political thriller, one of the masterpieces in the genre. District Attorney Varga is shot dead while picking a sprig of jasmine. Then Judge Sanza is killed. Then Judge Azar. Is this string of murders an individual vendetta or a more sinister plot? The charming detective inspector Rogas works his way into the mind of his prime suspect, Cres. The pursuit of truth and justice are Rogas's vocation, but his work is frustrated by a system which defies his understanding. The book, written in 1971, uncannily prefigures the Red Brigade's subsequent killing of magistrates and the Catholic-Communist pact of the late 1970s in Italy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #504442 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-12
• Original language: Italian
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
District Attorney Varga is shot dead and then two judges are murdered - Inspector Rogas works his way into the mind of his prime suspect in Equal Danger, a wide-ranging political thriller that brilliantly evokes Sicily by a great European writer. There are four novellas in Sicilian Uncles in which illusions about history and ideology are lost in mirth, in suffering and the abandonment of innocence. Each is set in a historical moment: the events of 1848, the Spanish Civil War, the Allied invasion of Sicily and the death of Stalin.

About the Author
Leonardo Sciascia was born in Sicily in 1912 and died there in 1989. Like Joseph Roth, Sciascia worked with deceptively simple forms - books about crime, historical novels, political thrillers - and was a master of lucid and accessible prose. This polished surface conceals great depths of sophistication and an intense engagement with the moral and historical problems of modern Italy, especially of his native Sicily. His books are rooted in a particular culture; they speak to anyone who has ever wondered how people can endure unbearable injustice. Equal Danger was made into the film Illustrious Corpses by Francesco Rosi.

Customer Reviews

Murder, political corruption and one man's principles
The murder of one prominent judge, quickly followed by others, sets Inspector Rogas on the trail of their killer. His investigations uncover more than his superiors had bargained for when he discovers that they have turned the killings to suit their own political ends, by blaming them on "Revolutionary factions" and not the one man that Rogas knows to be responsible.
Even the left wing oppostion party get their feet wet in this mess. Rogas soon finds himself under surveillance by the Secret Service and he has to take a hard decision based on his own stringent principles of justice.
Sciascia uses the characters in Equal Danger to illustrate the political coersion between Government and supposed Oppostion, the failure of the police authorities to pursue a realistic line of enquiry and reflects his own strong views on justice in the actions of his main character, Rogas, a man of principles in a land where none existed.
Equal Danger asks more questions than it answers, but coming from a country (Sicily) where answers are hard to come by, it is hardly surprising that Sciascia challenges the reader to come up with their own.

Ponderous Parable
This slender novella is more of a parable about government power than it is a traditional mystery or thriller (in an afterword, Sciascia himself describes it as a ìfable about power anywhere in the worldî). Written in 1971, the story follows a policeman in charge of investigating the murders of two judges. The setting is a unnamed country where the government and the supposed opposition are merely two sides of the same coin, and is clearly based on the author's native Sicily. Inspector Rogas's investigations rapidly lead him into areas his superiors would rather he left alone, and he is repeatedly told to focus on pinning the blame on "revolutionaries". As more and more judges and prosecutors gets killed, it becomes clearer and clearer that Rogas is being diverted for political motives. This surface story is merely a vehicle, however, for Sciascia's views on the limits of justice and reason. The Inspector is alone as a man of principles, and the unmistakable message is that only in the movies are principles and reason enough to carry the day. It's not the most gripping story, but for those of a metaphysical bent, it is full of intellectual diversions such as the question as to whether there can be such a thing as a judicial error, and discussions of Voltaire, Pascal, and others. The translation is crisp and lively, but the overall tone is so ponderous that it's not exactly the most engaging work.