"Sicily today is a difficult place to live and every part of the world has become a little 'Sicilianised'." This is how Leonardo Sciascia recently described his island home. From his earliest works to his latest novel, one is always conscious of the ambiguous love-hate rapport he has with his native Sicily. As he once said, "all my books, in fact, make up one book. A book about Sicily which deals with the sore points of its past and present; the story of the continual defeat of Reason." With his latest novel, Il cavaliere e la morte (The Knight and Death)^*, Sciascia reaffirms for all, even his more acerbic critics, his position as one of Italy's and Europe's most significant writers. His terse prose, tinged with irony and bitterness, reflects a man whose deep awareness and acute understanding of the nature of Sicilian reality allow him to identify the malaises in its society. I spoke to him recently at his Palermo home where we discussed his new novel.

Now entering his sixty-ninth year, Sciascia does not hold out much hope for any society. "In life these days it is impossible to arrive at any form of truth." Sciascia has always been recognized as a writer concerned with justice - moral, ethical and political. Diderot and Alessandro Manzoni are two of his 'masters'; hence his attachment to Reason, in the sense of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, and moral conscience to combat the injustices and atrocities committed when intolerance and stupidity ...