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Title: Midnight in Sicily by Peter Robb ISBN: 0-375-70458-2 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 22 February, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.41 (27 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Great Read, Unique Travel Writing
Comment: Before I travelled to Sicily, I was looking for a book that would capture the culture of this Italian island. Other than DiLapedusa's "The Leopard" (fiction) I wasn't aware of and couldn't seem to find any other books on the island. I stumbled across this and was charmed from page one. This is really a little masterpiece of travel writing/journalism/history. Although I normally don't find time to read while travelling, I couldn't put this book down. Don't listen to any negative reviews, this book is superbly written, insighful and a very comprehensive text on Sicilian culture. It might be said that the focus is loosely Mafioso, but the author does an unmatched job at integrating history, food, and the intricasies of Sicilian society and culture. You'll be blown away. This one's for my library!
Rating: 5
Summary: Spellbinding, elusive
Comment: Reads more like a novel.Characters, settings, rich history woven expertly ... at times will make you stop reading to comtemplate ... implications ... what is between the lines ... and meditate on such hearts of darkness.
Rating: 4
Summary: Italy's Dysfunctional Social Contract
Comment: Peter Robb's memoir of time spent in the Italian mezzogiorno - chiefly Sicily, but also Naples - is partly a travel book, partly a commentary on art (especially the painter Renato Guttuso) and on literature (particularly the novelists Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia), and partly a celebration of gastronomy. Mostly, however, it is about the power of organized crime in Italy, especially in the south, and its peculiar relationship (parasitic and symbiotic) with the Italian government.
The power of the mafia and camorra arose from the historic misrule of the mezzogiorno. Robb discusses their remote origins, but concentrates on events since the Allied liberation of Sicily in 1943. Mussolini had attempted to suppress the mafia, and both its Sicilian and American branches (the latter represented by "Lucky" Luciano) accordingly aided the U.S. army in driving out the fascists. The results, like those of U.S. aid to Islamic mujahideen resisting Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, demonstrate the way in which such alliances of convenience and "proxy warfare" can backfire. Robb describes how the Sicilian mafia subsequently established ties with the Christian Democratic Party (democristiani), with the tacit approval of the U.S. government and the Roman Catholic church, as an ally in the anti-communist cause. Even as this was taking place, mafiosi strengthened their connections with organized crime in other parts of the world, including the United States, and garnered unprecedented new wealth in the international drug trade. Necessary money-laundering was accomplished through penetration of the banking industry, both in Italy and abroad. Corruption of the government proceeded all the way to the top, including the prime minister, Giulio Andreotti.
All governments, even corrupt and tyrannical ones, have some sort of social contract with the people governed under them. The democratic ideal holds that this should be one openly and freely reached. Dictatorships and absolute monarchies attain their social contracts by a mixture of demagogy and repression, so that the "consent of the governed" is obtained by combined elements of fraud and force. The Italian case is an especially strange one, in that government and organized crime have become so intimately connected as to appear almost two sides of the same coin. Albert Jay Nock, in "Our Enemy the State," wryly pointed out that many of the things governments do would be considered crimes if done by ordinary individuals. If the state takes life, it is called war or capital punishment. If you take life, it is called murder. If the state takes property under the threat of force, it is called confiscation or taxation; if you take property under the threat of force, it is called robbery or extortion. When the state prints banknotes that have no value other than that assigned by the state, these are called fiat money. When you print them, they are called counterfeit. The state, argued Nock, does not want to suppress crime; it wants a state monopoly on it.
Many people in the south of Italy take this cynical view of their government, and have good historical reason for so doing. If rulers do not regard government as a public trust, the ruled see no reason to do so either. When government has no moral legitimacy, organized crime becomes an alternative system of social control. As Robb's account makes clear, the mafia is and always has been both a competitor and collaborator with the state. ... It is a cautionary tale about what happens to the social contract as a result of the loss of public trust, and how nearly impossible it is to restore it.
"Midnight in Sicily" is a fascinating book. I did not find its discursive and digressive style as frustrating as some reviewers here, although I confess to finding some of Robb's verbal and typographic idiosyncrasies irritating. The book's one telling defect is its lack of an index, which would have been quite useful.
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Title: The Leopard by Guiseppe Di Lampedusa ISBN: 0679731210 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 23 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: On Persephone's Island : A Sicilian Journal by Mary Taylor Simeti ISBN: 0679764143 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 26 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Stone Boudoir: Travels through the Hidden Villages of Sicily by Teri Maggio, Theresa Maggio ISBN: 0738208000 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Wine Dark Sea (New York Review Books Classics) by Leonardo Sciascia, Avril Bardoni, Albert Mobilio ISBN: 0940322536 Publisher: New York Review of Books Pub. Date: November, 2000 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: About Sicily: Travellers in an Ancient Island by David D. Hume ISBN: 1880158248 Publisher: J N Townsend Pub Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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