Volume 26, Number 16 · October 25, 1979
On the Assassins' Trail
By Gore Vidal
Candido: or, A Dream Dreamed in Sicily
by Leonardo Sciascia, translated by Adrienne Foulke
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 132 pp., $7.95
Since the Second World War, Italy has managed, with characteristic artistry, to create a society that combines a number of the least appealing aspects of socialism with practically all the vices of capitalism. This was not the work of a day. A wide range of political parties has contributed to the invention of modern Italy, a state whose vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last living legacy anywhere on earth of the house of Bourbon (Spanish branch). In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.
Review, 6416 words
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