Brilliant writing
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This is a short book - 166 pages - and every page is a gem. Nearly every paragraph and certainly all chapters could be read on their own - they make sense, they read beautifully and, more often than not they are very funny. I read Naples'44 years ago and by accident picked up this book and straightaway remembered how brilliantly Lewis writes. I shall now go onto his other books having been a complete idiot not to do so earlier.
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poignant and cold-blooded study of the Sicilian Mafia.
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Norman Lewis's connections with Sicily are deep and personal. Before spending eighteen months in Southern Italy at the conclusion of the Second World War (Naples '44 - an Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth) Lewis had lived in the London house of an elegant Sicilian gambler named Ernesto whose daughter Lewis eventually married. Thus Lewis used his contacts with the the Sicilian section of the British Intelligence Corps to filter news about real estate in Sicily to Ernesto who hoped to repatriate because his London house had been bombed. Writing a book about the Sicilian Mafia proved to be a more devastating process, and perhaps Lewis stayed with it, witness to the deaths by cancer and assassination of Italian friends, because of his near-blood tie. In Sicily, the resulting collection of vignettes, shows over and over again that the Sicilian Mafia is an ancient and ineradicable remnant maintained by poverty, Church and State. For small restauranteurs as for Mafia chieftains, as Lewis's friend Agostino tells him over a dish of illegal small fry in a Palermo seafood eatery, survival is all a matter of paying protection on time. "Laws don't exist in this country." In Sicily is ultimately satisfying for combining poignancy and complexity of a novel with reasoning and cold facts of reportage. --sfjoseph@his.com
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United Kingdom | 
Canada