Jul 05 2007
It’s a family affair
Who Is Lou Sciortino? Ottavio Cappellani Picador, 227pp, £14.99
In April 2006, Italian police captured a 73-year-old man they found hiding in a run-down farmhouse outside the Sicilian town of Corleone. Dressed in jeans and a pullover, he may have looked harmless to the untrained eye, but this man was in fact Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, wanted for a string of murders. For years, Provenzano had evaded capture, communicating with his family through a system of handwritten notes and a network of underlings. It’s this mix of the scarily powerful and the banal that drives Ottavio Cappellani’s farcical tale of Mafia life in modern-day Sicily. So much so, in fact, that there’s a character who appears to be modelled on Provenzano: Jacobbo Maretta, who hides from police in an underground bunker. “Whenever he has to go out, he takes a tractor as far as the village, where a yellow Fiat 127 is waiting to take him to a dealer in garden statues in Ispica. There he gets on a truck, changes inside it, and when he gets out, usually at Catania airport, he’s all spruced up.”
The short answer to the question posed by the novel’s title is this: Lou Sciortino is the grandson of a New York Mafia boss (”Don” Lou), a fearsome character who “could peel a man like a potato, then leave him lying there, skinned alive, reflecting on his sins”. Don Lou invests in the Hollywood film industry as a way of laundering money, placing his grandson at the head of a production company. When a rival gang tries to take over his business by planting a bomb in the office (”pieces of screenwriter everywhere”), Lou the younger is sent to Sicily, to lie low until the trouble has died down. But it proves to be anything but an idyllic Mediterranean getaway for Lou, as he finds himself embroiled in an internecine struggle between Mafia clans on both sides of the Atlantic. The film industry theme lends a kitsch, sheen to affairs: a wannabe director, Leonard Trent, keeps pitching film ideas that end up becoming real-life conspiracies in the novel.
Readers looking for a rounded portrait of modern-day Sicily might be disappointed. Glimpses of the world inhabited by Mafia dons and their henchmen - the thuggish, sharp-suited picciotti - are fleeting, as the author eschews descriptive detail in favour of a fast-paced narrative. On occasion, though, Cappellani hints at the narrow alleyways and tiny shop doorways of his native Catania (where he divides his time between writing and singing in a rock band), or via Etnea, the main drag that cuts “like a whiplash” through the city, leading to the volcano that towers over it. And much of the story takes place at the barbecues that are a staple feature of Sicilian social life. In the novel, these are run by Sal Scali’s nephew Tony, a hairdresser with a natty taste in silk shirts and 1970s disco, who entertains a mix of friends, family (in both senses) and local politicians. “You got to explain this democracy thing to me,” pleads one confused mafioso. “At least when there was a king, you knew who you had to shoot.”
It’s a testament to Cappellani’s skill as a narrator that the labyrinthine plot never gets overly confusing. He is fond of wordplay, even though not all of it makes the transition from Sicilian dialect into English (a confusion between the word for “octopus” and the word for “homosexual” has to be spelled out laboriously by the translator, Howard Curtis), but plenty of the humour survives. At a film industry dinner in Rome, Greta, an ingénue who ends up burying her designer stiletto in the eye socket of a would-be assassin, is asked what she thinks of the Italian director De Sica. “Delicious,” is her reply. “I went to Da Sica’s in Tribeca . . . a really hip restaurant.”
As you might expect, the novel has a number of chillingly violent episodes, which follow Don Lou’s bizarre logic that “we’re living organisms, and like all living organisms, we sometimes need to lose a few cells to regenerate”. But Cappellani is also keen to show us the frailty of his characters. In a scene towards the end of the novel, Don Lou’s henchman Pippino is described as “tenderly” arranging a blanket over his boss’s legs, while the old man grumpily pretends not to like it. This world might be intriguing, but it’s hardly glamorous. At the novel’s close, Don Lou wonders what happened to the good old days, when people followed a code of honour and respect, before coming to the inevitable conclusion: they never existed in the first place.
It’s a family affair - Daniel Trilling - Published 05 July 2007 - http://www.newstatesman.com/200707050050
