Book Review: The Honored Society (2008) by Petra Reski

The impetus for this look at Italy's various Mafia organizations was the 2007 execution-style murder in Duisburg, Germany, of six Italians from Calabria. The six were part of the 'Ndrangheta, one of southern Italy's three great Mafia crime groups, the other two being the Camorra, based in Naples, and the Cosa Nostra, based in Sicily. The German public and police were shocked to find that the Mafia were engaging in turf wars outside of Italy, and German journalist Petra Reski's book is a sort of field guide to the environment the Mafia comes from and is supported by.

Reski structures her book something like a travelogue, as she and her friend Shoba, an award-winning photographer who's made a career photographing the world of the Mafia, traipse around southern Italy checking in on sites and individuals who are key to the recent history of the region's mafias. This isn't the most conventional or academic way to go about chronicling organized crime, and at times the book reads like a loosely-stitched together group of magazine articles, but it's a fascinating read and Reski has some intriguing insights into the Mafia's entrenched position in Italian politics and society.

One of the startling observations Reski makes is that the Catholic Church is a key spiritual component of the Mafia. Over here in North America we occasionally hear about brave anti-Mafia priests, or equally occasionally the Pope issues a statement decrying a Mafia atrocity, but the rank and file of priests in southern Italy are more than happy to provide mobsters with confession, baptisms, marriages, and all the other ceremonies held dear by Catholics. It's a symbiotic relationship. Mobsters value the way the Church has embraced them because it shows that they're not outcasts or apostates; they're still part of Italian society despite being murderers. The Church supports the Mob because it views it as being in opposition to the Italian state, which, in the Church's eyes, is sinfully secular. In short, the Catholic Church finds more to like in a cabal of killers than it does in a democratic state.

In the last thirty or so years one of the key tools in the fight against the Mafia has been the testimony of turncoat mafioso, from foot soldiers all the way up to capos. What's fascinating about these "traitors" is the way in which their families turn against them. Their wives, children and parents hold mock funerals for them, and generally make a great show of their hatred for anyone who betrays the Mafia. In this respect the Mafia comes across as a cult or religion. The loathing for Mafia turncoats is very real, and it has striking similarities to way in which religious fundamentalists of various stripes react to apostates.

After the Mafia's high-profile murders of public prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992, the Italian government had a chance to really uproot the Mafia thanks to a groundswell of public outrage against the Mafia's contempt for the Italian state. For a few years the Mafia was on the run, but the rise of Silvio Berlusconi ended all that. He formed a partnership with the Mafia that gave him votes in the south, and the Mafia got a rollback of various anti-Mafia laws. The present situation is dire. The Mafia is now so embedded in Italian politics and finance that any attempt to remove it might, like cutting out a tumor, end up killing the patient. Simply put, Italy seems to have lost control of the southern half of the country, and any serious attempt to destroy the Mafia would cause so much economic/political disruption and dislocation that no ruling party is likely to risk undertaking such a campaign. This is an issue that concerns the EU as well, because significant chunks of the European economy are now controlled by the Mafia, and their growing financial muscle could seem them become a de facto member of the EU.

This isn't a book filled with colorful tales of Mafia shootouts and assassinations (alright, there are a few), but it is a wake-up call for anyone who thinks the Mafia is nothing more than a localized Italian problem. It's also a reminder that any capitalist organization, no matter how criminal, becomes immune to prosecution once it becomes large enough and powerful enough to get its hands on the levers of power. .

Book Review: Bandit Love (2009) by Massimo Carlotto

I'm a big fan of Massimo Carlotto, but Bandit Love is a mess. Carlotto is one of the better Italian crime writers, and knows more about the subject of crime than most writers thanks to having once been thrown in prison for a murder he didn't commit. His autobiographical novel about his ordeal, The Fugitive, is sensational, and his crime novels The Goodbye Kiss and The Master of Knots are lean, tough and gritty.

The problem with Bandit Love is that it's issue-driven. The issue is the corruption of Italian society from top to bottom and from side to side. In the Italy of Bandit Love everyone takes bribes, pays bribes, use drugs, sells drugs, hires illegal immigrants, or is an illegal immigrant. And while Carlotto obviously has a lot to say on this subject, he doesn't have a plot to carry his editorializing along for the ride. The story has "Alligator" (Carlotto's private eye character) helping a friend track down his kidnapped girlfriend. That story is wrapped up halfway through the novel and then Carlotto switches gears and we follow Alligator and his friends as they take revenge against the Serbian mafia boss responsible for kidnapping the woman. Both plots are lazily developed and generate zero tension.

Another sign that Carlotto really didn't have a coherent plan for this novel is that he has Alligator nattering on about jazz and blues, mentioning his favourite songs, and so on. Any time a crime writer has his main character making frequent commentaries about music, films, food or local history, you know the author's treading water because his plot is too thin. If Silvio "bunga-bunga" Berlusconi is any indication I can well believe that Italy is as rotten as it's depicted in Bandit Love, but whining and bitching about it isn't a good basis for a novel. Carlotto should take a look at Dominique Manotti, a French crime writer who effortlessly mixes political commentary with complex, fast-paced, violent plots.

Below is the trailer for Arrivederci Amore, Ciao, the film version of The Goodbye Kiss. The film's excellent, and even though the trailer isn't in English, it is available on DVD with English sub-titles.

Book Review: Bell' Antonio (1949) by Vitaliano Brancati

Poster for the film of Bell' Antonio

"What begins as farce ends in tragedy."  I don't know where that quote is from or who said it, but it's an apt description of Bell' Antonio, a tragicomic Italian novel that reads like a Fellini film brought to literary life. Not, however, the playfully surrealist Fellini of 81/2 and Juliet of the Spirits, but the earlier Fellini of I Vitteloni who took a harsh look at the preening shallowness of young men in a small Italian town. It's no surprise that this novel brings to mind a film since Brancati, the author, was also a noted screenwriter, collaborating several times with Luigi Zampa, one of Italy's top comedy directors of the 1950s and '60s.


The central character is Antonio Magnano, a young man so handsome, so beautiful, women are poleaxed with lust simply by looking at him. Antonio is the only child of an upper middle-class couple from Catania in Sicily, and when he returns home in 1934 after spending several years in Rome, his father, Alfio, hopes that the social connections he made with politically important people in the Fascist government will help the family's fortunes. Things seem to pay off in spades when a marriage is arranged for Antonio with Barbara Puglisi, the beautiful daughter of one of Catania's most notable families.  Three years into the marriage rumors start to circulate that Antonio isn't quite the virile creature everyone assumed he was, and from this point things start to go pear-shaped for Antonio and the Magnanos.

The first third of the novel has a comic tone as Brancati gives us scathing portraits of Fascist politicos and stuffed shirt Sicilian bourgeoisie. The star character here is Alfio, a bellowing, blustering, boastful exemplar of Sicilian machismo. Alfio lives for family honour and pride, and when the Magnano name starts to be dragged through the mud, his reactions are both hilarious and, by the end of the novel, pitiable. And Alfio is only one of several striking characters Brancati creates. Antonio's Uncle Gildo, a disillusioned priest, is almost as memorable, as is Antonio's best friend, Edoardo.

Brancati's skill at characterization is matched by his fluid, natural way with dialogue. As I read the novel I found I was hearing the dialogue rather than just reading it; I could imagine particular Italian actors reciting the words I was reading. It's no wonder Brancati had success as a screenwriter.

The last third of the novel has a darker tone as WW II sweeps over Sicily, and Catania is reduced to rubble and penury. It's here that Brancati makes explicit the point of his novel, which is that the middle class obsession with honour, social standing, political opportunism, machismo, and family pride meant that a blind eye was turned to the rise of Fascism and Italy's disastrous march to war. And even though Bell' Antonio ends on a down note, Brancati's earthy, robust writing style make his novel a memorably pleasurable experience.