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Leeds University hosted a successful ‘Italian Writers’ series by inviting Giancarlo de Cataldo to speak about the link between Italian crime and fiction, a subject of which he can consider himself well qualified. An appeals-court magistrate in Rome and successful crime novelist wrote Romanzo Criminale (Crime Story) , a tale of the Magliana gang who came from the streets into the world of organised crime, growing into a powerful crime dynasty controlling not only Rome but a good deal of the mafia from the 1970s. Based on the true events, Romanzo was adapted into a screenplay by Cataldo himself in 2005 leading to a debut nationwide in the UK cinemas. Cataldo’s latest publication is as a contributor and editor of a collection of short stories written by the best Italian crime writers in the business, Crimini, which has been translated and published by Bitter Lemon Press this year.
Avoiding the glamorous illusion of organised crime Crimini and Romanzo mix the raw violence of crime with the reality of the human condition. Dissecting his personal writing process Cataldo declared that as a novelist rather than a journalist he deals with the myths and the characters of the stories, almost humanising the history and facts of criminal behaviour. Throughout the talk, Cataldo discussed crime fiction as a genre, depicting the reality of Italian crime; gone are the days of the picturesque olive oil country as are the old families, the Godfathers and Goodfellas. Italy is now a multi-cultural country, as Crimini’s blurb declares ‘the mafia is not just Sicilian but also Albanian, Croatian and Chinese’. Fear of the immigrant is rife within Italy, they become the shadows in the alley for readers of crime fiction, they are both the unknown and also the reality of modern crime. Yet Cataldo claims the scarier aspects of his fiction are the characters who are caught between good and evil and usually all share one trait, the obsession with success: both a human trait and a very Italian characteristic. After an hour and a half, I found myself sucked into this shady world of Italian crime and the process of writing about it. Cataldo is a very charismatic speaker whose anecdotes and genuine interest in the questions poses created an informal atmosphere despite the lecture theatre environment.
I would suggest the Romanzo Criminale film adaptation (unfortunately the book has not yet been translated into English) to anyone interested in the epic gangster flicks like The Godfather and Goodfellas, as this is the reality of crime. Romanzo’s director considered Cataldo’s characters as grandchildren of the Italian working class we see so much of in post-war Italian literature and cinema. The true art of Catanaldo’s work is that he manages to write a novel about organised crime, drugs, murder and terrorism where there is no binary code of good or bad, there are no heroes and no villains, only human beings who try to reach for the stars the only way they can.
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