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Friday Notebook 09.02.11
Leonardo Sciascia, in the final novella collected in Open Doors, “1912 + 1,” explains a point of timing in the testimony of the case he is describing: When he [the witness] says “one night at about two,” he would, in those days [1913], have been understood by everyone to mean two hours after Avemaria and not, as now, two hours after midnight. Then—and indeed until well beyond my childhood—the day was not divided civically, as it were, by clock-tower chimes but ecclesiastically, by the ringing of church bells: Salveregina, Noon, Vespers, Avemaria, and the Second Hour of the night.Read More
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Friday Notebook 08.26.2011
I’ve been reading, as a sort of relief from poetry, the utterly European novellas of the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia. The first three quotes below are from Open Doors; the second is from Death and the Knight. They are two of the four novellas collected in Open Doors and Three Novellas, the title of which implies that Open Doors itself is not a novella. Well, maybe so. Although it is must 72 pages long, it is structured like a novel.Read More