I have yet to read Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, the best-selling Italian book which has become a famous film.
The book examines the depth of the mafia control of Italy: Italian life, Italian families, and business in this country, in a vice-like grip that will perhaps never be shaken off.
Saviano is not about mythologising the mafia, a popular passtime, it seems, in Italo-America and other cultures who understand nothing of the seriousness of how a society can suffer under an organised crime regime such as this.
In this interview, Saviano talks of what he hopes his obituary might say, getting inside the head and hearts of his readers and the stink of mafia money as the bosses attempt to make heros of themselves.
Roberto Saviano has been nominated for the European parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
Saviano was nominated by Sonia Alfano, chair of Italy’s association of mafia victims.
I wonder if the freedom of thought prize will help assuage the life of imprisonment, in hiding from the mafia, that Saviano now leads.