Word: puzo
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...Puzo works hard to make his story back-lot mythic. Spartacus led his slave army out of the Cammarata hills to fight the Romans. A skeleton dug out of the rocky soil is said to have belonged to one of Hannibal's elephants. The novel's hero, Turi Guiliano, is a Latin Robin Hood who can recite the Song of Roland and the basic guerrilla manual with matching ease. When he is not slipping into Montelepre for his mother's cooking and the attractions of a young widow, Turi muses under starry skies: "He no longer doubted...
Guiliano dreams of smashing the power of the "Friends of the Friends." Sicilians, Puzo tells us, never say Mafia, a 10th century Arabic term meaning sanctuary. A thousand years later, the word is dark with irony. Founded to fight foreign oppressors, the organization has come to include the island's most terrible despots. Their fingers can be found in every business and social institution from Palermo to Catania, their hands behind countless murders. Puzo offers swatches of sad history and exotic sociology. Mussolini nearly wiped out the Mafia, but the U.S. Army ensured its comeback when it unlocked Fascist...
Unlike a spaghetti western, The Sicilian has no one-on-one shootout under a hot sun. Instead, Don Croce and Guiliano are locked in an elaborate melodrama of betrayals within betrayals. Puzo too demonstrates sly moves. His florid descriptions and graphic action scenes guarantee bug-eyed attention while he plants a sardonic fatalism in the heart of his book. One of the rarest commodities in his Sicily is truth ("A source of power, a lever of control, why should anyone give it away?"), while revenge is one of the highest virtues ("On this Catholic island, statues of a weeping Jesus...
This is cynical stuff from one of the most "respected" characters in popular fiction. But Puzo knows the mass-market game better than most: Give the angels the good looks, the devils the best lines, and keep the prose cinematic. This element is so strong that the book seems to be only the pupal stage of a story impatient to spread celluloid wings...
...Sicilian, Puzo...