The Moro Affair | Granta Books

  • Published: 02/01/2014
  • ISBN: 9781847089298
  • 129x20mm
  • 176 pages

The Moro Affair

Leonardo Sciascia

Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch

On 16 March 1978, Aldo Moro, former Italian Prime Minister, was ambushed in Rome. Within three minutes the gang killed all five members of his escort and bundled Moro into one of three getaway cars. An hour later the Red Brigades announced that Moro was in their hands; on 18 March they said he would be tried in a ‘people’s court of justice’. Seven weeks later Moro’s body was discovered in the boot of a Renault parked in the crowded centre of Rome. In this book, Leonardo Sciasica, a master of detective fiction, untangles the real-life events of these crucial weeks and provides a unique insight into the dangerous world of Italian politics in the 1970s.

The greatest compliment one can pay this fascinating book is to say that it reads like a fable about power anywhere in the world

Independent

Sciascia's perceptive treatment of this horrible business brings out the black comedy of Moro's plight and he draws on Pirandello, Borges and Foucault in a brilliant examination of the nature of rhetoric and power

Sunday Times

The Moro Affair is at the heart of Sciascia's public writings... a dazzling piece of invective... [Moro] will be remembered largely as the subject of this great master's greatest polemic

Philip Hensher, Spectator

The Author

Leonardo Sciascia was born in Sicily in 1912 and died there in 1989. A master of lucid and accessible prose, Sciascia worked with deceptively simple forms – books about crime, historical novels, political thrillers – in order to engage with the moral and historical problems of modern Italy, especially his native Sicily. His books are rooted in a particular culture but 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.

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