The memoir of a mafia boss serving life imprisonment for a string of murders has won a Sicilian literary prize named after one of the first Italian writers to challenge – not without controversy – the Cosa Nostra.
Malerba, a book which recounts the life, crimes and education of Giuseppe Grassonelli – an erstwhile "savage criminal" by his own admission – emerged triumphant in this year's [Leonardo] Sciascia-Racalmare prize on Sunday.
But its victory sparked an angry row in Sicily, the late writer's homeland, where one of the jurors, Gaspare Agnello, quit last week over the book's shortlisting, saying its candidacy was an outrage.
"First because it has been written by a lifer who is telling his version of events, which cannot be compared with the version of others who have been hurt by Grassonelli," Agnello, a friend of Sciascia, wrote on his website.
"And also because, even if more than 20 years have passed since the crimes concerned, there are injured parties who still feel the pain of their loved ones' deaths. In the book there is also an attempt to justify the protagonist's dreadful and criminal behaviour."
However locals in Grotte, the town in Sicily where the prize is decided, disagreed, awarding Malerba more votes than other works on the shortlist, which included a book by the daughter of assassinated anti-mafia judge Rocco Chinnici.
Carmelo Sardo, a journalist who co-wrote the book with Grassonelli, wrote on Facebook – with a photograph of himself beside a bust of Sciascia – that he was "proud" of the prize, "which I share with all those who believe in the rehabilitation and redemption of someone who has made a mistake and is making amends. And we know [Sciascia] believed in that."
In Grassonelli's biography on the website of his publisher Mondadori, it notes that the former mobster "is serving a life sentence for a series of murders committed in Sicily between the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s".
The former boss has been in jail ever since his arrest in 1992 and critics note he has never, like many other mafia detainees, turned state's witness. Fans of the book counter that it is a moving portrait of a man coming to terms with his past misdeeds. His biography ends: "He entered prison semi-literate; now he has a literature degree."
If Sardo made a point of saying that Sciascia too believed in the value of someone admitting their own mistake and repenting, it was perhaps because the writer's own legacy as a searing mafia critic is tarnished – some even say obliterated – by an intervention he made towards the end of his life in which he criticised aspects of the anti-mafia movement and accused two of Italy's then bravest anti-mafia figures of "careerism".
Champions of Paolo Borsellino, a magistrate who was assassinated by the mafia in 1992, and Leoluca Orlando, a politician who is now mayor of Palermo, rallied to their defence, and eventually Sciascia apologised. "But the very considerable damage was already done," writes literary critic George Scialabba in the introduction to the English translation of Sciascia's Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl).
In the book, first published in 1961, Sciascia wrote about "an organisation whose very existence virtually no one else at the time was willing to acknowledge", Scialabba says.
In it, courageous policeman Captain Bellodi attempts – and ultimately fails – to expose not only the mafia's murderous activity but also its high-level connections in politics and bourgeois Sicilian society. Questioning locals, he is told by his sergeant to give it up: "It's like squeezing tripe; nothing comes out."
