From the time of Giovanni Verga, the celebrated Sicilian novelist of the verisimo (realism) school in the nineteenth century, writers have tried through their works to enrich and revitalize Italy's literary-linguistic tradition. If one leaves aside the baroque prose of the Lombard writer Carlo Emilio Gadda, perhaps no Italian writer more than Vincenzo Consolo has so forthrightly challenged the dominance of the Tuscan-based written language that has been the official language of Italy since Unification despite the vibrancy of regional dialects. Through his novels Consolo has celebrated the language of his native Sicily while critically examining paradigmatic moments in Sicily's history since Italy's Unification. His clear intention is to highlight the essentially flawed nature of that history and its quintessentially nonrevolutionary origins which, to adopt the words of Tancredi in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo (1958; translated as The Leopard, 1960), have allowed conditions to change so that they...