Excellent Cadavers

Alas, such a bummer, but I couldn't finish this.

I really enjoyed Stille's later book, about Berlusconi, The Sack of Rome. This book likewise featured a super-important figure of post-war Italian political history: Giovanni Falcone. It seemed like a sure-bet.

I'm always on the look-out for good English-language books about Italy, since there aren't many and lots of crazy shit has gone down and continues to go down in il bel paese (cue music). Alas, then. I just couldn't get into this book, even though Falcone was such an admirable, amazing person: he was an anti-mafia Sicilian prosecuting magistrate who was eventually murdered by the mafia in 1992 (they blew up the highway he was driving on (!)). His murder was one of the most pivotal (and depressing) events of 90s Italy.

This book, unfortunately, just felt very rambley and dry. I guess I would have preferred a long-view history of the Sicilian mafia, from its origins to how it developed under the Bourbons. Stille, instead, gives us just a few short brushstrokes of the Cosa Nostra's history (about half a chapter), and then he dives into the minutiae of the 1980s mafia landscape: in particular, the rise of the Corleonesi family (from Corleone), which was more violent and more out of control than the old time mafia families of Palermo. Stille goes into fastidious detail about the various mafiosi and their networks in 1980s Sicily, but it just feels like a lot of names and a lot of tangled relationships. I kept asking myself if this info was still relevant, thirty years later.

I should also admit that I'm not one of those people who finds the mafia intrinsically interesting. For better or worse (mostly worse), lots of people (1) make mafia jokes to me when they learn I'm Italian, or (2) romanticize stuff like The Godfather and so on. Yo, I'm all about a good “Take the (x), leave the cannoli!” joke, but this naive fascination is sometimes pretty tiresome. It's like, no, it's not really that funny and certainly not cool, it's just a giant parasite of organized crime, and it's sad and frustrating. For that reason, learning that Mr. So-and-so was part of this-and-that family, who killed Mr. Other-guy, was making my eyes glaze over. After seven chapters, I went out (BUT THEY PULL ME BACK IN). Obligatory Godfather joke.