ABSTRACT
Luigi Malerba is a very prolific writer, attuned to critical debate. Il fuoco greco, published in 1990, is his third fiction set in a bygone era and focusing on the corrupting influence of power. Following the postmodern historiographical consideration of evidence as signs to be interpreted, Malerba suggests that the real world is a series of signs. However, given the duplicitous nature of appearances in the real world, it is inevitable that such signs frequently prove to be indecipherable, and truth inaccessible. Malerba's use of sophistic dialogue eschews the notion of linguistic transparency and singular, unifying truth and effects a decentring and pluralizing of the possible interpretations of reality. Thus Malerba pushes the dialogue on the boundaries of history and fiction to its limit. Correspondingly, there is a notable absence of accessible centralized meaning in the text; instead meaning is pluralized by intertextual references and intricate dialectic process.
