The Transaction

Abstract

Ancestral cradle and crossroads of civilizations, Sicily is an island of serene quietude and rough violence, of courage and connivance, of tradition and nonconformity, of immigration and emigration, of welcome and mistrust. In The Transaction, Guglielmo D'Izzia captures the island's self-contradictions and ambiguities as only an expatriate Sicilian can do. The novel traces the external and internal journey of an impenetrable and unsympathetic northern Italian who, in order to finance a property deal, travels from Milan to Sicily's hinterland with a luggage of antisouthern prejudice. This physically brave but morally weak protagonist, identified only by the last name of De Angelis, turns from businessman to occasional detective but, as in Leonardo Sciascia, it is the investigator who ends up being suspected rather than the murderer.D'Izzia sets his remarkable debut novel in the fictional town of Figallia, an archetype of the dark side of southern Italian small-town life where not even the Sicilian sunlight can penetrate the darkness and dispel the effects of provincialism, corruption, and brazen disregard of laws. A torrid sun plays its own merciless role in the protagonist's nightmarish journey, tormenting De Angelis from the moment he sets foot in Sicily to complete the titular transaction, through the destabilizing set of events leading up to the climactic episode. Here he experiences an outburst of an anguished inner world in a cathartic moment of self-discovery.While the author chose to set the story in an anonymous Sicilian village, he anchors the symbolic location in a specifically dated setting, the early summer of 1987, the year in which the most significant trial ever against the Sicilian Mafia, the so-called “Maxi-processo,” ended with the conviction of 338 mafiosi. Written in hindsight, The Transaction bears witness both to the tragic end of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the public prosecutors who gave their lives to the fight against Cosa Nostra, and to the dissipation of the general sense of hope of defeating the Mafia in Italy.With his accessible prose and detached sarcasm, as well as his view of Sicily as an inexhaustible mine of metaphor for Italy's seemingly invincible ills, D'Izzia follows on the footsteps of literary giants of the likes of Pirandello, Sciascia, and Andrea Camilleri. One of the book's closing sentences, uttered by an overcaricatured train-station employee, “mutu, orbu, e surdu sugnu!” (“I am dumb, blind, and deaf,” that is, omertà) (226) encapsulates both the essence of D'Izzia's Hemingwayan elliptical style and his condemnation of the Italian penchant for the comforting complicity of silence.