La buona legge di Mariasole by L. R. Carrino
As Mariasole Simonetti travels with her husband Giovanni’s hearse to the Poggioreale cemetery, she shakes her son’s hand. Mariasole retraces her steps as she moves toward the terrible moment. On the Mergellina rocks, Giovanni Farnesini, the boss’s son, was discovered dead. He erred by breaking the most crucial tenet of the Acqua Storta pledge, which states that “a Camorrista must always think with the brain, never with the heart.” The harmony of the family is in jeopardy because his father is behind bars and his father-in-law is missing. Mariasole must assume control of the clan. She had chosen a different life for herself and her son Antonio, but she is unable to make up her mind.
La buona legge di Mariasole by L. R. Carrino
Amazon.com
The story of the Camorra—the Neapolitan mafia—is told by Neapolitan Carrino in a very literary manner; the Camorra he describes is significantly different from the one we are used to hearing about. He has such a profound insight of personalities and expresses a complexity we have never encountered that it feels as though he is explaining it from the inside. He goes so deeply into the souls of these women, and it’s amazing how he was able to portray things from a female viewpoint.
We are able to examine a variety of subjects since Carrino chose Mariasole, a woman and the widow of one of the Camorra’s key figures, as our protagonist…
Again, Carrino’s goal is not merely a literary exercise; it is grounded in reality. Mariasole is a completely real character that exists in the vast riddle that is the connection between the criminal and female universes. When her character reveals specific details about this connection, it raises a number of issues that readers aren’t used to thinking about, such as how the wife fits into the dynamic between the clan’s father and son. Mariasole is a revolution because she flips the script. Rather than acting in a meek manner that is typically associated with women in criminal situations, Mariasole is extremely strategic in how she lives her life.
Additionally, her relationship with her son is extremely dissimilar from what we might anticipate. The mother and son attend Giovanni, Mariasole’s husband and the boy’s father, funeral in the opening scene of the novel, following which Mariasole begins doing everything in her power to facilitate her son’s ascension to prominence within the clan, overcoming every challenge along the way. The mafia is all about power being transferred from one guy to the next, but in this case, a woman with exceptional intelligence, cunning, and humanity manages to seize the steering wheel.
A fantastic book that you won’t soon forget. Most importantly, the writing is exquisite; the author skillfully shaped the words to fit the characters’ and the narrator’s mouths. Here, the Camorra is the only goal, thus one exhales more widely. He uses the knife to cut it. Angela Lieto, a tiny character who, in my opinion, has taken over the entire scene of a horrific, horribly plausible world, is the one who, above all else, conveys the notion of the underworld dimension described. Beautiful, macabre conclusion. Instead, it seemed to me that Ferdinand was given an excessive amount of screen time.
