The surface impression of [Conversazione in Sicilia] … is a transparently simple plot, with a pervasive air of fable and persistently paradoxical use of language. It was immediately acclaimed a classic and is still considered the purest literary distillation of the anti-fascist experience in Italy. It holds an oblique fascination for Italian writers and intellectuals as a cardinal point which must be accounted for in any attempt to grasp the intellectual directions of modern Italian writing. But is it sufficient to take the book as a political denunciation? And if so, why was it written at such a level of poetic abstraction? The purpose of the present essay is to try to answer these questions by defining the novel as a "polyvalent" text (a technical term borrowed from serial music) and hence to set out four possible "values" which the variables in the text may correspond to, and argue...