Friday, February 22, 2008

To Live And Die in Napoli


On the advice of the New York Times, I bought "Gomorrah", by Roberto Saviano. It's a massive bestseller (2 million copies) in countries not named U.S.A. (it's now available in 33 languages), and it's a book about an old-fashioned thing: crime and corruption in Naples. As a resident of a similar crime-ridden city/state with a strong and healthy tradition of murder and corruption (my Baltimore, see The Wire; also note that Omar is a ninja), the book is interesting on one level in the "my rotten town is more wicked than yours" sorta way (Naples utterly wins, as Saviano makes perfectly clear within the first chapter).

It came out last year (in English), but—perhaps because of the translation, or perhaps because of the innate Italian languor—it has a very 19th century feel to it. Also, this is probably due to the fact that Naples, in many ways, is still stuck in the sort of appalling semi-lawless horror through which many 19th century European regions suffered. Anyway, take out the scooters and cell phones and AK-47s, and it could be about Naples in 1808. Probably 1608, too. In a way, it's because of the means by which Saviano (a Neopolitan) gathered his info: he lived it, rather than recreating it (see: Sebastian Junger), but it's not the same as a blustery tell-all by some mob capo. He operated on the periphery (and sometimes within) of criminal activities, and he hung around wise guys (and kids), and he was in a lot of places he shouldn't have been. As such, he is now a man with a very large target painted on his head. But the feel of the book is that of a memoir of ancient sociology by a medieval chronicler, and I think it works.

There are a multitude of wonderful moments in the book so far: Here are three.

1. The genesis of a gown worn by Angelina Jolie (and the couture wear draping many a high-class dame) is (probably) revealed to be the product of near-slave labor shops run by a crime syndicate (read about this here, from WWD).

2. One female mob boss travels with a coterie of female bodyguards wearing bright yellow jumpsuits. Yes, like Kill Bill.

3. To teach young ganstas how to not be afraid of getting capped, the kids are taken to the outskirts of town, given a bulletproof vest to wear, and then they are shot. It emasculates the gun as a guaranteed death machine. It is effective.

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