Sicilian Uncles is the title given to four early stories that mark Sciascia’s entry into real narrative writing, his journey from the realism of his first book Le Parrochie di Regalpetra (The Parishes of Regalpetra), which was based on news items and historical events, to fiction. The stories’ common background is Sicily, seen through the changes that history has imposed on the island. The American Aunt is about the experience of emigration while in Stalin’s Death it’s the belief in Communism as secular salvation that takes centre stage. Rather different and set in a previous epoch is The Forty-Eighter, in which Garibaldi’s campaign and some of its consequences for Sicily are described, while Antimony recounts the dramatic story of a Sicilian miner who is a volunteer with the fascist legionaries fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

In all the stories one can see Sciascia’s attempt to bring the ‘natural’ narrative material of Sicilian reality together with broader themes emerging from the needs of storytelling itself, to free the potential of local material from sterility by showing it in the light of wider events.

‘The Americans were already in Regalpetra, when it became known that Mussolini had been arrested in Rome. The news seemed to come from another world, as already, for the previous fourteen days in Regalpetra, people had been giving vent to their feelings against every kind of Fascism with chisels, fire and spittle. Calogero felt a little sad, seeing Federation spies and local Fascist leaders in frenetic anti-Fascist zeal, going round with the Americans, whispering denunciations; to satisfy them, the Americans took away the political secretary, the mayor and the carabinieri marshal. Calogero judged the Americans to be di prima informativa, people who thought the first comer was right. The Russians would have reacted differently. To round off his indignation, the carabinieri sergeant came to tell him that the Americans didn’t like the meetings he held in his shop. The Americans perhaps knew nothing about the meetings, but they certainly didn’t please some of their go-betweens.

In an indulgent moment, Calogero cut two portraits of Stalin out of an American magazine, and put them in handsome frames, hanging one up in the workshop and the other in the bedroom, next to the Madonna of Pompei, which his wife had on her side of the bed. «Oh, that’s your father is it?» she commented, bitterly, but seeing him turn ugly she said nothing more.’ p67