Diceria dell’untore: Sicily, Memory, and the Redemptive Power of the Word in Bufalino -

by Patrizia Riello Pera, Padua, Italy

In 1981, the Campiello Prize was awarded to Gesualdo Bufalino for Diceria dell’untore (The Plague-Sower’s Tale), a novel of extraordinary, explosive, dazzling, and almost miraculous literary intensity, an authentic late-blooming prodigy of Italian culture that instantly consecrated the elderly, reserved writer from Comiso as one of the most elevated, cultivated, refined, and indispensable stylists of contemporary literature and of the entire twentieth century. The work is admirably, painfully, and masterfully set in a Sicilian sanatorium in the aftermath of the Second World War: La Rocca, a spectral, claustrophobic, almost Dantean place, metaphysically suspended in a perpetual limbo between the shore of life and the abyss of death, where chronological time expands, deforms, and is inexorably consumed in the biological wasting of young, diseased bodies. Bufalino builds, with baroque, hyperbolic, and precious artistry, a dense, labyrinthine, nocturnal narrative, orchestrated like a symphonic score and incredibly rich in poetic suggestion, daring metaphors, linguistic acrobatics, and a hypnotic verbal musicality that transforms the mud of pain and agony into pure, crystalline formal beauty. In honoring this novel, the Campiello Prize made a historic, courageous, and revolutionary choice that shook the editorial and critical landscape of the time to its foundations, recognizing a refined, exquisitely precious, erudite form of writing, woven with learned and endless intertextual echoes of the great classical and Mitteleuropean traditions, and profoundly original in its ability to restore to the Italian language an expressive nobility, a goldsmith-like dignity, and a semantic density that seemed to have been definitively lost in modernity. The novel confronts, with lucid, ruthless, proud, and moving clinical and philosophical precision, the universal themes of illness, moral and biological contagion, forced confinement, and the constitutive fragility of the human condition, presenting itself as an exalted, dramatic, and sorrowful meditation conducted throughout in a lyrical, elegiac, tragic, and deeply contemplative tone. In the work, death appears and asserts itself not as a mere terminal event, but as a constant, daily presence: a tangible, sensual, almost ironic shadow moving through the corridors and dormitories of the sanatorium, and yet revealing itself as the necessary and propitious occasion for a radical, definitive reflection on the naked truth of existence, on the mysterious guilt of the survivors, and on the redemptive, almost theological value of the written word. From this dazzling and belated debut—made possible by the farsightedness of Leonardo Sciascia and Elvira Sellerio—Bufalino emerges as a unique, isolated, sovereign, and anachronistic voice within the Italian literary landscape, capable of masterfully fusing the autobiographical memory of his own youthful years spent in a sanatorium with the purest fantastic, dreamlike, and visionary reinvention. The prestigious, authoritative, and historic Venetian award thus recognized, exalted, and consecrated without hesitation an absolute masterpiece of Italian fiction from the second half of the twentieth century, offering readers a timeless metaphysical meditation on human destiny, on the inviolable sacredness of the supreme instant, on the desperate sensuality that flares violently at the very edge of the abyss, and on the immortal, epic, and incorruptible power of great literature understood as the only weapon of redemption, testimony, and lasting triumph against oblivion and the vanity of things.