Volume 24, Number 2 · February 17, 1977
The Society of Friends
By Luigi Barzini
Mafioso: A History of the Mafia from Its Origins to the Present Day
by Gaia Servadio
Stein and Day, 302 pp., $10.00
It is a well-known fact that a Sicilian writer (or a writer about Sicily) finds relatively few difficulties gathering colorful, startling, and tragic material. He simply sits at his table in Palermo or Syracuse and records his own (or his Sicilian friends') childhood memories, what he happened to hear, café or bookshop gossip, what the cook casually learned at the market, or what his wife heard at the hairdressers. In a pinch, he can always blow up one of the morning paper's insignificant local stories into an ominous novella, a demented tale of decaying aristocrats or a ruthless vendetta among peasants or underworld killers. Historians, essayists, journalists, moralists, and sociologists compile fascinating collections of outlandish true events with equal ease. Most of these books are anxiously read everywhere in the world except in Sicily. Sicilians consider them banal. Old ladies in Palermo said of Il Gattopardo: 'We do not understand why so much fuss should be made of that novel. After all, poor Tomasi di Lampedusa only wrote what everybody knew.'
Review, 3155 words
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