Category Archives: Books

Books, Movies

Talking about books I read: ‘How Star Wars Conquered The Universe’

star_wars_cover_3297190a

Pal Seamus was reading this book when I went to meet him one evening in Larchmont Village. Even though there were other books in my queue, hard to resist a book about Star Wars. Not that I have much love for the franchise – people’s reactions to it make me shake my head in bemusement and back away slowly. [ref]while growing up, some people distinguished between Star Wars and Star Trek as the series with the tube-light lights and the series with Mr Spock. Star Trek played on Doordarshan in 1985, a year before we bought our first TV, so I bypassed that too. But there were kids in school who would pinch you really hard on the back of your neck, because Mr Spock. [/ref]I suspect the most invested I was in the series was while reading a bunch of Star Wars novels about 10 years ago, specifically The New Jedi Order series, which begins with the death of Chewbacca in the first book. Don’t worry, this is not really a spoiler, none of the books are canon anymore, especially with The Force Awakens and the planned one-Star-Wars-movie-a-year releases. Just so you know, this book talks about that happening too, with the kind of cold-blooded objectivity that sends shivers down your spine.

When fan grief over the death of Chewbacca surpassed anything Shapiro or Stackpole expected, a rumor surfaced that Randy Stradley of Dark Horse Comics had told the meeting to “kill the family dog,” and compared Chewie to Old Yeller. But Stackpole denies that, insisting they all stuck the knives in at the same time, like Roman conspirators. Shapiro, who would edit the book, was happy to wield a blade. “You’ve got to get people’s attention. Otherwise it’s just ‘Oh, another adventure, another super weapon,’” Shapiro explains.

Why the interest in this book then, you ask? Because the behind-the-scenes affairs with the series has always fascinated me. Stars Wars’ tendrils encompass a lot of sci-fantasy pulp fiction, old-school Hollywood space operas, and world cinema. Alex Raymond and Akira Kurosawa, EE Doc Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs coming together in a cultural bouillabaisse that is timeless and appealing to multiple generations, clunky dialogue be damned. Lucas, an avowed non-writer, worked his way through anxiety and budgetary nightmares to try and bring back to life his childhood fascination with film serials; to deconstruct what made his heart soar in a darkened movie theater. And – pardon my mixed pop-cultural metaphors – he even went boldly where few screenwriters had gone before, tapping into primal myths and stories, specifically the themes and archetypes that writer Joseph Campbell identified in his seminal works. For me, knowing about Star Wars was much more enlightening than watching the movies. [ref] Here’s a confession: I saw the first 20 minutes of Empire Strikes Back when I was 11 or 12, and did not make sense of it, obviously. I have vague memories of watching one of the Ewok movies a year later, and that was a cutesy experience where storytelling did not matter. I saw New Hope in my second year of college, shaking my head over the outdated effects at the end but letting myself be sucked into the world. Then came the prequels, and much as I enjoyed them in the theater, the relentless barrage of wtf-ery in both plot and dialog overpowered the love of the world Lucas created. Yes, I have never seen Return of the Jedi. [/ref] That’s why I jumped on this book immediately.

Also, turns out Campbell had nothing but good things to say about Lucas, who met him later in life and befriended the academic:

“I was really thrilled,” Campbell said of the Star Wars series in a later interview. “The man understands the metaphor. I saw things that had been in my books but rendered in terms of the modern problem, which is man and machine. Is the machine going to be the servant of human life? Or is it going to be master and dictate? That’s what I think George Lucas brought forward. I admire what he’s done immensely. That young man opened a vista and knew how to follow it and it was totally fresh.”

The book opens in a wonderful manner, a screening of Star Wars dubbed into Navajo, where the writer tries to find Star Virgins, people who hadn’t seen any of the movies before. He spirals out into how pervasive the movie’s references have become, and how it is very hard for anyone at all to come into Star Wars with a blank slate. (If I remember right, someone did a Star Wars virgin watch on Twitter recently.) Alternate chapters of the book talk about fandom and the weird ways in which everyday lives of people have been affected by the movie. I had no idea, for example, that light-saber classes existed:

The easiest way to describe light-saber class is that it’s one part fencing, one part yoga. The goal is to learn a numbered system of fight choreography worked out by Bloch and his co-founder Matthew Carauddo, who runs the same class in a studio in Silicon Valley. You and I could meet for the first time with our light-sabers at a Comic-Con, say, and I could utter a string of numbers and you would know that I was going to slice around your body in a star formation and parry appropriately. We could even throw in flourishes such as the figure eight, or something more elaborate Bloch calls the “Obi-Annie” (but which is actually a move called “plum blossom” from the martial art Wushu). We would for one moment shed our nerd shells; we would look cool.

Or that the imperial storm-troopers you see at conventions are part of an officially-endorsed Stormtrooper legion created and managed by loyal fans, called the Fightin’ 501st. They later went on to be name-checked and referenced both in novels (Timothy Zahn’s Survivor’s Quest) and in the prequels, though in an ill-fated turn of events, they will forever be known as the baby-jedi killing storm-troopers.

It was, friends agreed, a pretty neat idea. They helped him hand out leaf-lets at conventions: “Are you loyal? Hardworking? Fully expendable? Join the Imperial 501st!” In 2002, Johnson mustered roughly 150 Stormtrooper costumers in Indianapolis at Celebration II, the second official Star Wars convention, and offered their services to a skeptical Lucasfilm to let the 501st help out as crowd-control when the event’s security proved woefully inadequate for the thirty thousand attendees. Lucasfilm was won over by the tireless, hyper-organized troopers, and started to use the 501st as volunteers for all its events. Lucasfilm licensees followed suit. If you’ve ever been to one of the Star Wars Days held at dozens of baseball stadiums across the United States, if you’ve seen multiple Stormtroopers, or Darth Vader or Boba Fett at a store, a movie theater, or a mall, you’ve almost certainly been staring at the forces of the 501st.

The 501st Legion is now recognized as one of the largest costuming organizations in the world. It has active members in forty-seven countries on five continents, divided into sixty-seven local garrisons and twenty-nine outposts (those units that comprise fewer than twenty-five members). More than 20 percent of the troops are female. The 501st absorbed a once-independent UK garrison and established a garrison near Paris, though some French Stormtroopers have gone their own way with the 59eme legion. The Germans, meanwhile, have a garrison consisting of five squads that are all large enough to be garrisons on their own—but are loath to undergo any kind of de-unification.

Swooping into a quick history of Lucas’s childhood and influences, the book talks about his early avant-garde career – one of his acclaimed student films, for example, was comprised entirely of panning shots of photographic images with music playing in the background. The takeaway is that Lucas always had ideas, but they were unconstrained by any Hollywood pretensions – the three-act screenplay was not for him, until American Graffiti came about. The nugget there is that the name did not quite appeal to the studio bosses, because the word “graffiti” was not in popular usage then.

It sounded odd to contemporary ears. The Italian word had not yet gained common currency. New York subway trains were about a year away from being covered in spray-painted signatures. Lucas hadn’t intended that debased usage of the word in any case; he meant the word invented at Pompeii in 1851 that means nostalgic etchings. He wanted to record the legacy of a lost decade: an American Pompeii, frozen in time forever.

Lucas tried to follow up this success with options of Dune and Flash Gordon. Producer Dino DeLaurentiis happened to get Flash, and Alejandro Jodorowsky got hold of Dune. Flash Gordon ultimately got made as a campy pastiche in the early 80s, while a different version of Dune made it to the screen. The book talks about trippy possibilities that the latter presented, and this reminds me that I need to check out the documentary soon:

Jodo, appropriately enough for Dune, was something of a cult leader himself. He persuaded the great Orson Welles to act as the villain of the piece in exchange for hiring his favorite Parisian chef, and even managed to hector Salvador Dali into agreeing to a cameo as the Emperor of the Universe (for $100,000 a minute, Dali insisted). He got the Swiss artist H. R. Giger, possibly the only person in Europe weirder than Jodo and Dali, to do a bunch of nightmarish concept paintings, and recruited French comic book artist Moebius to storyboard the entire film at lightning speed.

Most of the making of the actual Wars movies was not new to me. Too much have already been written about the process, and the different iterations of the first movie’s screenplay that Lucas banged out. One thing however stood out, the short-lived gender reversal of the lead character, a telling choice for a series that has been plagued with gender/race allegations until the recent sequel. Think of what might have been.

In March 1975, Lucas decided to fix that at a stroke: Luke Starkiller became an eighteen-year-old woman. After all, he’d been reading an awful lot of fairy tales as research into the mechanics of storytelling, and it’s rather hard to ignore the convention that the protagonist of fairy tales is almost always female. (Think Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White, Red Riding Hood, and Goldilocks—as much as they have to be saved by princes or woodcutters, we at least see the story through their eyes.) This gender reversal lasted for a couple of months, long enough for the female Luke to show up in a McQuarrie painting of the main characters.

The discussion becomes much more entertaining with the movie’s release. Taylor goes into an inspired examination of the first few words on the screen – words that apparently were rewritten at the last minute by Brian Coppola to lessen the original verbosity.

Consider instead that this is exactly what every fantasy epic needs to give you right off the bat: a setting in space and time that says, relax. Don’t bother trying to figure out the relationship between what you’re about to see and your own Earthbound reality, because there isn’t one. This isn’t Planet of the Apes; the Statue of Liberty isn’t going to turn up in a last-reel twist. No other movie had ever announced its divorce from our world so explicitly before; with the exception of Star Wars sequels, none would ever be able to do so again without seeming derivative. The perfect simplicity of those ten words appears to have been hard for a lot of people to understand in the run-up to the movie’s release. The words that open Alan Dean Foster’s novelization (“another galaxy, another time”) aren’t quite the same—that might place us in the future, rather than in a story that is safely in some history book. Fox didn’t get it at all: its trailer for Star Wars opened with the words “somewhere in space, this may all be happening right now.” The ten words remain on the screen for exactly five seconds, long enough for the casual viewer to think, Isn’t this supposed to be a science fiction movie? Aren’t they all set in the future?

It is this modern myth, that of how the Star Wars machine became what it was, in the first weeks and months after the release of the first movie, that the book really captures so very well.

In May 1977, repeat viewers didn’t necessarily add to the ticket gross: they could simply stay in the theater, wait an hour or so, and watch the movie again. This was not something viewers had tended to want to do before. Indeed, it was because of Star Wars that most cinemas instituted a policy of clearing the audience out of the theater between shows. But as soon as they left the theater and came back, the repeat viewers were responsible for an incalculable amount of box office takings. For many—and this is something you see time and again in television and newspaper reports from 1977—the number of times they’d seen Star Wars took on the tone of a competitive sport: “I’ve seen Star Wars twenty times!” But for many more who weren’t quoted by the news media, it was simply a thrill to invest themselves in a story with such eminent repeatability. You could see it twenty, thirty, forty times and not get bored.

***

The manager of the Coronet, a cranky old soul named Al Levine, had never seen anything like it. He offered a now-famous description of the crowds: “Old people, young people, children, Hare Krishna groups. They bring cards to play in line. We have checker players, we have chess players; people with paint and sequins on their faces. Fruit eaters like I’ve never seen before, people loaded on grass and LSD.”

***

In June 1977, the monster crowds at the four theaters in New York showing the film each required police on horseback for crowd control. All walks of life rubbed shoulders in those lines. Johnny Cash, Muhammad Ali, and Senator Ted Kennedy waited at their theaters like everyone else. Elvis Presley tried a different tack; the King was in the process of securing a Star Wars print to screen for himself and Lisa Marie at Graceland the day before he died.

***

In May 1977, the most popular poster in America was an image of Farrah Fawcett, chief Charlie’s Angel, in a bathing suit, with a noticeably aroused nipple. By July, Star Wars posters were outselling Fawcett five to one.

***

Toy sales came to the rescue. Despite the movie no longer being in theaters, despite the disastrous Holiday Special, and against all expectations, Kenner announced that it had its strongest holiday season yet. Sales of Star Wars action figures, spaceships, and play sets had crossed the $200 million mark, funneling more than $20 million into Lucasfilm subsidiary Black Falcon. Without that cash injection, there’s little question Empire would have been sunk. There’s something poetic about it: millions of children joyfully acting out the further adventures of Luke Skywalker literally funded the further adventures of Luke Skywalker. Call it a karmic Kickstarter.

It’s funny how Taylor blazes through the three prequels all in one chapter. Star Wars fans from the New Hope generation are so predictable.

All in all, the book was an excellent read; it did make me want to re-watch (or watch, in case of Jedi) the original movies, and put in pieces of the Star Wars history that were missing from my understanding of the history of the seminal series, especially the debt Lucas and Co owe to concept artist Ralph McQuarrie, whose designs really helped sell the movie to both Lucas’s friends, his team and studio heads. My dismissive tone about the series is at odds with my fascination for its metadata, as you can clearly see. I know the technical details of where the sound of Wookie comes from (‘a bear starved in a zoo and then shown a bowl of milk outside the cage’, for your information) or how Lucas made a note when someone asked for Reel 2, Dialog 2 in the editing room of THX 1138, or the story behind how Han Solo’s sprezzatura in saying “I know” came about. I can also appreciate how it probably is the only bit of mythology that America can truly call its own. The person sitting next to me at the morning screening of the Force Awakens cried a few times as the movie played. My local comic-book shop (and others) had large “Star Wars Spoiler Free Zone” signs up the first two weeks of release. All I wonder is how long this reverence will continue to play out. A major part of Star Wars is to do with how little we know about the Star Wars universe and its details – and it only takes a few years of misbegotten scripts to run a special thing into the ground, to turn a mythic tale into something mundane.

Standard
Books, Life

Things I learnt on the first day of 2016

  • A cap of whiskey dunked into a smoothie adds a subtle flavor to it that is hard to pinpoint and makes it super interesting. For reference, the other ingredients in the smoothie were 3 kiwi fruits, 1 banana, a slice of peeled ginger, coconut water as the base, chia seeds and a smidgen of honey.
  • Waking up to a long, heart-warming email on January 1 could be the best thing to wake up to on the first day of the year.
  •  If you are in a shopping mall and see a massage chair, go sit on it for 5 minutes. Er, don’t just sit on it, I mean, insert that money to switch it on. Totes worth it.
  • In a choice between udon and ramen lunch, the place with the lowest waiting line wins. Also, you win, regardless of the line.
  • This is important: there are three books on Shunga, or Japanese erotic art, that I have been aware of. I had always set my eyes on Ofer Shagan’s Japanese Erotic Art as the definitive one, thanks to reviews and also because of the price/value ratio. Rosina Buckland’s book is a hardcover and comes in a lower price point, but 176 pages seems far less definitive. Timothy Clark’s Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art does seem more well-rounded in terms of content, but the 99$ price point is excessive. Today, however, I found out about a fourth book that does not turn up in any of the lists. Poem of the Pillow and Other Stories by Utamaro, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi and Other Artists of the Floating World is a mouthful of a title, and it’s out-of-print, but used copies are available for 20$ or thereabouts. Gian Carlo Calza, the writer knows exactly when to let the pictures do the talking and when to interject with commentary. This one’s probably coming into the bookshelf pretty soon.
  • Little Tokyo in Downtown LA has a gallery called Q2, which features indie artists’ work on the walls for sale and display. I nearly pooped my pants at an original Kagan McLeod watercolor of Gordon Liu, and some wonderful work by Alina Chau and a bunch of other names I don’t remember. Definitely worth going back.
  • People in the UK have already watched Sherlock: The Abominable Bride, which makes me grit my teeth. In my defense, I am holding off to watch it on Tuesday, where it plays in the theater opposite my workplace, single-screening only.

Ah, fuck it, I will just go watch it tonight first.

Standard
Books, Food

On Curry

curry

Lizzie Collingham – Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors

 

Reading Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham, and learning fascinating things about different kinds of Indian cuisine.

Among the myths busted and tales told, the most wondrous are the account of the food habits of early Hindus, easily .

One of the best records of Hindu courtly cuisine has been left to us by the twelfth-century King Somesvara III. He belonged to the Western Chalukyan dynasty of kings who ruled over parts of present-day Maharashtra and Karnataka. Unusually for a king, he was more interested in the arts and literature than in waging war. Although parts of the kingdom were slipping out of Chalukyan hands, he busied himself with writing an encyclopedic account on the conduct of kingly affairs. Delightfully entitled Manasollasa, meaning refresher of the mind, it paid some attention to the conduct of affairs of state and the qualities needed by a king.

A king needed to eat a “suitable, healthy and hygienic” diet. This might include lentil dumplings in a spicy yogurt sauce, fatty pork fried with cardamoms, or roast rump steak.Alongside mutton, pork, and venison, “sparrows and rats, and cats and lizards” could all be found on sale in the markets of the capital city. Some of Somesvara’s other favorite dishes sound less appetizing: fried tortoise (said to taste like plantain) and roasted black rat.

Oh, fuck yeah, Chalukyas. A far cry from 2015, when I spent a few hours poking around shops in Sikkim and on the Nepal border looking for dried buffalo meat – sukuti, as it is called locally. Apparently they no longer sell it in Indian towns any more, despite the healthy presence of a Nepali population. My heart still withers at the memory of a 4 kilo pack of sukuti that the cleaning lady in my Hyderabad apartment threw in the trash on her own initiative because it smelt funny. I would have dump-dived to get it back but she also made sure to throw the trash out well before I came back home.

The book goes on to talk about Somesvara’s rat recipe.

The rats which are strong black, born in the fields and river banks are called maiga; these are fried in hot oil holding with the tail till the hair is removed; after washing with hot water, the stomach is cut and the inner parts are cooked with amla [sour mango] and salt; or the rat is kept on iron rods and fired on red hot coal, till outer skin is burnt or shrinks. When the rat is cooked well, salt, cumin and sothi [a flour made from lentils] are sprinkled and relished.

The Mughlai section of the book begins with Babur’s dismay at this strange land, so different from that of his forefathers.

The people paraded about naked apart from grubby loincloths and lacked beauty; society was devoid of grace or nobility, manners or etiquette. No one possessed any poetic talent, a sign of the highest cultivation in his homeland. One of Babur’s chief complaints against Hindustan was that the food was awful. “There [is] no good . . . meat, grapes, melons, or other fruit. There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in the markets,” he grumbled.

I sort of understood. [ref]My personal gripe this time, while visiting Guwahati in February, was that I could not find parsley anywhere. There was however very specific variants of coriander, especially a delicate grassy-looking version that smelled divine.[/ref]

While a lot of description of Mughlai cooking takes up the early part of the book – which includes Abu’l Fazl’s recipe for biryani the way it was cooked in Akbar’s kitchens. His recipe calls for “10 seers of rice; 5 seers of sugar candy; 31 seers of ghee; raisins, almonds and pistachios, 1 seer of each; 2 seer of salt; 5 seer of fresh ginger; 11 dams saffron, 21 misqals of cinnamon. ” [ref]1 seer is 24 lbs or 10-ish kilos, and a dam is 3 oz or 85 grams[/ref] Fazl also adds that this recipe will make four ordinary dishes, which makes me wonder about the appetite of those hallowed emperors and their ilk.

The main missing ingredient at that point in history was introduced into Indian cuisine by the Portuguese, and made its way into Southern India first.

Indians were often slow to accept new foods, but only a few years after chillies had been introduced a south Indian poet declared them the “Saviour of the Poor.” They provided a cheap and easy way to give taste to a simple meal of rice and lentils. Even Ayurvedic physicians, who rarely incorporated foreign foods into the cosmic world of diet and health, replaced pepper with chillies in many of their remedies. While the ancient recipes prescribed pepper water for those afflicted with cholera, nineteenth-century Ayurvedic physicians often used chilli both in plasters and in soups to treat the cholera patient. By this time they were a staple of the Indian diet and, “ground into a paste between two stones, with a little mustard oil, ginger and salt, they form[ed] the only seasoning which the millions of poor can obtain to eat with their rice.”

The dedicated chapter on Goan cuisine was tough to read while waiting for lunch to arrive. (Honestly, if you are planning to read this book, please make sure you have had a full meal. It made me want to throw all my notions of daily caloric intake aside and ladle bowls of ghee and cinnamon and lamb and cumin on a frying pan) The way the flavors of that tiny little state come together, and how some of its key dishes, especially in baking, traveled even further East with the Portuguese makes for great reading.

The result of this culinary interchange was a pleasing fusion of Portuguese ingredients (pork)—some of which were derived from Arab influences on Iberian cookery (dried fruit)—and Portuguese techniques (marinating and cooking in vinegar), with the south Indian spice mixtures, sour tamarind paste, shredded coconut, and coconut milk. Added into this already cosmopolitan blend were the recently discovered foodstuffs from the New World such as the chilli. Thus Goan dishes unite in their fiery sauces the culinary histories of three continents: Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

* * *

Over time Goan cooks replaced the European ingredients in Portuguese cakes with others more easily available in India. Coconut milk was used as a substitute for fresh cow’s or almond milk. Jaggery, the hard lumps of raw sugar made from the sap of the palm tree, replaced the more refined sugars used in Europe. Ghee supplanted fresh butter. The far more common and cheaper rice flour took the place of wheat flour. Goan confections were clearly derived from Portuguese cakes and pastries but they took on a distinctively Indian flavor. Bebinca is a typical example of the Goan adaptation of Portuguese cake-making traditions. It is made from a batter of coconut milk, eggs, and jaggery. A thin layer of the batter is poured into a pot and baked, then another layer is added, and so on until the cake forms a series of pancake-like layers. Ideally, it should be baked in an earthen oven fueled by coconut husks that impart a smoky flavor. Bebinca traveled with the Portuguese to Malaya, and from there to the Philippines, where the cooks dispensed with the time-consuming layers. From the Philippines bebinca continued on its extraordinary journey to Hawaii, where it transmuted into butter mochi, a fudgelike rice-flour dessert.

My favorite sections so far have been about Awadh and Lucknow, hardly surprising considering how influential that part of the country has been in the culinary department. Specifically, the Lucknavi reaction to the biryani vs pulao question. Lucknavi gourmets were willing to concede that “a good biryani is better than an indifferent pilau”. But biryanis were considered to taste too strongly of spices that overwhelmed the delicate floral flavor of the rice, and hence called a “clumsy and ill-conceived meal in comparison with a really good pulao.”

Also, the nawabs of Lucknow indulged in food duels! My head reels with ideas of food manga set in 19th century Lucknow, where noblemen indulge in gastronomical blood-feud and one-upmanship, culminating in orgies and general bonhomie.

In Lucknow a story is told of how the last nawab of Oudh, Wajid Ali Shah (1847–1856), invited Mirza Asman Qadar, a prince from Delhi, to dine with him. The prince, a noted gourmet, chose a spicy conserve of vegetables called murrabba from the array of dishes set down before him. As he began to chew he discovered to his surprise that he was in fact eating a qaurama of meat. Waji Ali Shah’s chef had taken great pains to disguise the qaurama, and the nawab was delighted that he had succeeded in tricking one of the great food connoisseurs of Delhi. Mirza Qadar went home feeling very embarrassed to have been caught out. He soon took his revenge. Waji Ali Shah duly received a return invitation. As he tasted each dish in turn he was stunned to discover that all the food—the pilau, the biryani, the meat curries, the kebabs, the chutneys and pickles, and even the breads—were all made of caramelized sugar. The nawab was defeated.

Other than Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the other colorful character in Awadhi history of that time is Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah, under whose patronage Lucknow cuisine yielded two major breakthroughs.

One of Lucknow’s most famous cooking techniques was perfected as a result of the need to provide food for the poor. In 1784, Oudh was struck by famine and Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah responded by paying the hungry to work on the building of the Imambara. Thus, he was able to prevent his subjects from dying on the streets while he continued to beautify the city to his own glory. Nanbais (bazaar cooks) were charged with the difficult task of supplying the workers with warm food at any time of day or night. They used the Mughal technique of dum pukht (meaning to breathe and to cook), a recipe for which can be found in the Ain-i-Akbari. The Indian cook also served a “dum poked”[ref]My next band, for those interested in this bit of TMI, will be called “dum poked”.[/ref] chicken when John Ovington dined with the English merchants in the factory at Surat. In Lucknow, the nanbais set up enormous cooking pots filled with meat and vegetables that were sealed with lids of dough and placed on hot coals. In this way the food cooked slowly and hungry laborers could be fed at a moment’s notice with tender pieces of meat that fell from the bone. When he went to inspect the work, the nawab is said to have found the smells rising from the steaming pots so inviting that he ordered the palace cooks to learn the recipe from the nanbais. Dum pukht was also applied to good effect to a dish of mutton and turnips that was brought to Lucknow by Kashmiris, looking for alternative sources of employment now that the Mughal court was in decline.

* * *

Indeed, Asaf-ud-Daulah became so fat that he could no longer ride a horse. He managed to gain vast amounts of weight despite the fact that his ability to chew was compromised by the loss of his teeth. Shammi kebabs are supposed to have been created in order to accommodate this problem. They were made out of finely minced and pounded meat, known as qima. The Mughals liked minced beef but in Lucknow the cooks preferred lamb, which produced a softer mince. They would grind the Korma meat into a fine paste and then add ginger and garlic, poppy seeds and various combinations of spices, roll it into balls or lozenges, spear them on a skewer, and roast them over a fire. The resulting kebabs were crispy on the outside but so soft and silky within that even the toothless Asaf-ud-Daulah could eat them with pleasure.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the wife of a British army officer passing through Lucknow noticed that “three distinct dinners” were served at the nawab’s table. “One at the upper end, by an English cook; at the lower end by a French cook; and in the centre (where he always sat,) by a Hindoostanee cook.”

I am about half-way through the book, around the time of the British residency, when there is still a fair bit of cultural disruption in progress, where the people coming in as traders and occasional meddlers in local political affairs have taken to calling themselves Anglo-Indians, and represent a new class hierarchy at par with noblemen and ruling houses. This is where the first rumbles of the term “curry”comes into being at least in its present usage, and also clarifies a bit of what makes that term so – pardon my use of the expression – bland.

What the British in India ate, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, was curry and rice. Anglo-Indian dining tables were not complete without bowls of curry that, eaten like a hot pickle or a spicy ragout, added bite to the rather bland flavors of boiled and roasted meats. No Indian, however, would have referred to his or her food as a curry. The idea of a curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture. Indians referred to their different dishes by specific names and their servants would have served the British with dishes that they called, for clarity, rogan josh, dopiaza, or quarama. But the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry. The British learned this term from the Portuguese who described as “caril” or “carree” the broths that the Indians “made with Butter, the Pulp of Indian Nuts . . . and all sorts of Spices, particularly Cardamoms and Ginger . . . besides herbs, fruits and a thousand other condiments [that they] . . . poured in good quantity upon . . . boyl’d Rice.” The Portuguese had adopted these terms from various words in south Indian languages. In Kannadan and Malayalam, the word karil was used to describe spices for seasoning as well as dishes of sautéed vegetables or meat. In Tamil, the word kari had a similar meaning (although nowadays it is used to mean sauce or gravy). As the words karil and kari were reconfigured into Portuguese and English they were transformed into “caril” and “caree” and eventually into the word curry, which the British then used as a generic term for any spicy dish with a thick sauce or gravy in every part of India.

Although they used the word curry to describe dishes from every Indian region, the British were aware of regional differences in the cooking of the subcontinent. In his cookery book on Curries and How to Prepare Them (1903), Joseph Edmunds stated decisively that “in India there are at least three separate classes of curry, the Bengal, the Madras and the Bombay.” “The Bengal artist,” wrote Edmunds, “is greatest in fish and vegetable curries. Bombay boasts of its peculiar gifts in its bomelon fish and its popedoms. Ceylon curries were usually piquant with chillies and made with coconut milk.”

And thus are generalizations born.

[amazon asin=0701173351&template=iframe image]

Standard
Books

Alex von Tunzelmann – Indian Summer

IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WERE TWO NATIONS. ONE WAS A vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swathe of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semi-feudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

This is how Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer begins. The book looks at the last few years of the Freedom movement in India from an impartial viewpoint, in many ways reminding me of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’ Freedom at Midnight. But I always found Freedom a little white-washed, too eager to steer clear of controversy, and also covering a very narrow period of India’s freedom movement. Specifically the last few years before we attained independence in August 1947 and the horrors it unleashed, culminating in the death of MK Gandhi in 1948. That is why I usually read it along with The Proudest Day, which goes back a little further. Von Tunzelmann mentions that the writers Lapierre and Collins were Mountbatten’s official biographers, which automatically makes me suspicious about the gentlemen’s lack of bias and their facts.

825690

Indian Summer takes a more relaxed, holistic route that begins with the flow of the British into India and establishes how the Raj came about, in broad strokes. But the meat of the story deals with the trajectory of the principals concerned – MK Gandhi, MA Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, including all of their early life stories. The book therefore becomes not just about 1947, but about these protagonists, and how their lives and motivations intertwine over the years, the narrative concluding not with the summer of ’47, as the name of the book would imply, but instead with the demise of the longest-lived one among them, Mountbatten. [ref]And I did not know that Mountbatten died in a bomb explosion in his fishing boat, the explosive planted by IRA terrorists. [/ref]

The writer is not kind towards most of the people she talks about. Mountbatten’s early career makes him sound like the air-headed protagonist of a PG Wodehouse novel – he apparently shoots a British general in the leg accidentally, and causes much mayhem during training exercises for D-Day during World War II. His career in the navy is marked with multiple submarines destroyed, but the magic of being associated with the British aristocracy miraculously sees him through his follies. The list of titles after his name ( KG, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, DSO, PC, FRS) sounds incredulous even as you read about his exploits.

Jawaharlal Nehru comes across as much more grounded, despite being from an upper class family and being subject to a deification from the population of India even in the early Congress years of the 1930s that sounds borderline insane. There are also stories of Nehru where he jumps into crowds and starts getting into scraps every time he loses his temper, and he does that a lot, especially in his later years.

Songs were composed in his honour; fantastic stories were told of his valour and bravery. A woman in Madras created a line of toiletries called the ‘Nehru Specialities’, and sent samples to him. His vanity was slightly offended by the ‘most disagreeable picture of mine’ branded on all the bottles, but otherwise he found them amusing and distributed the samples of Nehru Brilliantine, Nehru Pomade, and Nehru Lime Juice & Glycerine among his friends. Pamphleteers and orators called him ‘Bharat Bhushan’ (‘Jewel of India’) and ‘Tyagamurti’ (‘O, Embodiment of Sacrifice’) – nicknames which were gleefully picked up by his family. ‘When Bhai [Brother] came down to breakfast we bowed deeply and asked how the Jewel of India had slept, or if the Embodiment of Sacrifice would like some bacon and eggs,’ remembered Betty. The reaction of the chosen one to all this acclaim was characteristically self-deprecating. ‘It went to my head, intoxicated me a little, and gave me confidence and strength. I became (I imagine so, for it is a difficult task to look at oneself from outside) just a little bit autocratic in my ways, just a shade dictatorial.’

Von Tunzelmann however reserves an abundance of barbs for the future Father of the Nation.

Nehru saw social and economic hardship as a cause of suffering, and therefore wanted to end it; Gandhi saw hardship as noble and righteous, and therefore wanted to spread the blessings of poverty and humility to all people.

***

On 15 January 1934, a colossal earthquake hit Bihar, a rural province on the Gangetic plain beneath the Himalayas of Nepal. The devastated area stretched from Allahabad to Darjeeling, and from Kathmandu to Patna. The death toll was estimated at 20,000.  Gandhi visited Bihar in March, and spoke to the bereaved, destitute and homeless people. The earthquake, he told them, ‘is a chastisement for your sins’. And the particular sin that he had in mind was the enforcement of Untouchability. Even Gandhi’s closest supporters were horrified. The victims of the earthquake had included poor as well as rich; Untouchables, Muslims and Buddhists as well as caste-Hindus. But Gandhi was explicitly blaming the victims, appropriating a terrible disaster to promote his own religious ideas. Nehru, who had been helping the relief effort in Bihar, read Gandhi’s remarks ‘with a great shock’. But the most effective refutation came from Rabindranath Tagore, long one of the Mahatma’s greatest advocates. Tagore argued caustically that this supposedly ‘divine’ justice, if such it was, constituted the least just form of punishment imaginable.

***

Gandhi’s position on non-violence was absolute. Aggression could never be returned. He did not believe that women should resist rape, but preferred that they should ‘defeat’ their assailants by remaining passive and silent. Correspondingly, he did not believe that the victims of war should resist attackers by physical force, but rather ought to offer satyagraha – that is, non-compliance with the invaders. ‘If there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, war against Germany to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race would be completely justified,’ he wrote. ‘But I do not believe in any war.’ He advised the British to give up the fight against Hitler and Mussolini: ‘Let them take possession of your beautiful island … allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.’ Furthermore, in one of his most controversial arguments, Gandhi advised the Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime – and to give up their own lives as sacrifices.

***

Almost everyone on the Mission regarded Gandhi as the biggest culprit in holding up negotiations. Sir Francis Fearon Turnbull, a civil servant, was impressed with Gandhi’s clever drafting and legal mind, but not in the least with his attitude. ‘The nasty old man has grasped that he can get what he asks for’, he wrote, ‘& so goes on asking for more & more.’ Wavell, the Viceroy, agreed. ‘Gandhi was the wrecker’, he wrote to the King. Even Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the new Secretary of State for India noted for his mild manners and cruelly nicknamed ‘Pathetic-Lawrence’ on account of them, became exasperated by the Mahatma. He ‘let fly in a way I have never heard him before’, wrote Turnbull. ‘Said he was coming to believe Gandhi did not care whether 2 or 3 million people died & would rather that they should than that he should compromise.’

Since I am allowed one Watchmen reference every few posts, I can safely mention that to me, Gandhi comes across as the Rorschach of the Indian political movement. [ref]That makes Dr Manhattan = Indian Nationalism, who destroyed Rorschach when he got in the way of progress . Stretching this analogy further, Louis Mountbatten = Ozymandias (“I already did it, 10 months too early.”). Nehru is Nite Owl, haunted and ineffectual, but coming into his own with time. Oh dear, I hate myself. [/ref] His inability to compromise and his unyielding moral compass – not to mention his controversial “experiments” –  are all things that draws controversial discussions across living rooms. I am personally willing to be objective about him, just because what he did was so significant and completely unconventional, especially in an era of imperialism, fascism, ethnic genocide, the atomic bomb and two World Wars. [ref]

A Hipster Hitler webcomic exists. Maybe we need a Hipster Gandhi webcomic too? It will be easy to monetize as well.

  • Step one: Make Hipster Gandhi web-comic.
  • Step two: Get banned in India.
  • Step three:….
  • Step four: Profit.

Maybe Step three isn’t even necessary, at all.[/ref]

At the same time, ignoring the demerits of some of his ideas just because he is a near-deity in the country defeats the spirit of the man, and undermines his message. (Just as calling him Gandhiji adds to that saintly, omniscient persona, which I do not believe in) Some of his ideas are horrendous – if you quote them verbatim, they sound not much unlike rural politicians, phony god-men or evangelists in present-day India – or even the USA. Von Tunzelmann does not really say much that we don’t know through the man’s writings, or other writings about him, but there is one aspect of his life that I hadn’t thought about.

Congress was a largely secular and inclusive organization during Motilal Nehru’s prime in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Though it was the opposite of his intention, the emergence of Gandhi gave confidence to religious chauvinists. While Gandhi himself welcomed those of all faiths, the very fact that he brought spiritual sensibilities to the centre of politics stirred up extreme and divisive passions. Fundamentalist Hindus were rare presences on the political scene before Gandhi. In the wake of Gandhi, though, Hindu nationalists were able to move into the central ground of politics; while organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dedicated to the formation of a Hindu nation, swelled their ranks from the fringes. This was no slow, invisible political trend: it was happening visibly during the spring and summer of 1947, when holy sadhus clad in saffron robes marched around the streets of Delhi, bellowing forth political slogans.

In case these selective quotes make it appear as if the writer is placing the blame solely on Indians for the religious animosity that exists today, let me be clear that she points an equally harsh finger at the British policy of ‘Divide and Rule’.

Undoubtedly, the raj did plenty to encourage identity politics. The British found it easier to understand their vast domain if they broke it down into manageable chunks, and by the 1930s they had become anxious to ensure that each chunk was given a full and fair hearing. But picking a few random unelected lobbyists, based on what the British thought was a cross-section of Indian varieties, was not a reliable way to represent 400 million people. India’s population could not be divided into neat boxes labelled by religion and cross-referenced with social position. India was an amorphous mass of different cultures, lifestyles, traditions and beliefs. After so many centuries of integration and exchange, these were not distinct, but rippled into each other, creating a web of cultural hybrids and compromises. A Sunni Muslim from the Punjab might have more in common with a Sikh than he did with a Shia Muslim from Bengal; a Shia might regard a Sufi Muslim as a heretic; a Sufi might get on better with a Brahmin Hindu than with a Wahhabi Muslim; a Brahmin might feel more at ease with a European than he would with another Hindu who was an outcaste. When the British started to define ‘communities’ based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged. At the same time, Indian politicians began to focus on religion as a central part of their policies – defining themselves by what they were, and even more by what they were not.

Any book that talks about the last days of the Raj makes the butterflies in my tummy fly more frenetically, and this one was no exception. The story of the Indo-Pakistan Partition, regardless of the whys, hows and what-the-fucks, is just unbelievably tragic, and that’s an understatement. The missed opportunities, the what-ifs, the botched decisions – they are enough to make a reader want to throw up after every few paragraphs. In the end, all we have are numbers.

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

Finally, the book goes into much, much more detail about the Edwina-Nehru relationship than any other book I have read, and I do not want to read a book devoted to this topic alone, because the urge to sensationalize such a story, to find agendas and conspiracies and increase book-selling statistics is something we recognize all too well, we Upworthy-link-consumers. What I took away from the story is that Louis Mountbatten knew and accepted it. (Look at that cover picture above, at the perfect moment in time that it captures) That Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru were a lady and a gentleman who knew that certain things may be forgiven by the media and the populace, provided decorum is maintained, and the perks of high office aren’t scandalously utilized. Theirs seemed like a beautiful relationship that made both of them happy, one where they treated each other with love and respect. Isn’t that all that is required, from a relationship?

MA Jinnah comes across as a righteous man wronged, far ahead of his time, and yet susceptible to both ego and impetuous decision-making – Direct Action Day, anyone? There is an alternate history waiting to be written somewhere, where Nehru and Jinnah do not see themselves as rivals, and one becomes Governor-General and the other Prime Minister, possibly the most rational duo in 20th century politics. [ref] Or slash fiction. Slash fiction will save the world.[/ref]  What makes me think so? This:

Jinnah’s speech on 11 August made it very clear that he intended Pakistan to be a secular state. ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State,’ he declared, guaranteeing equality in Pakistan for all faiths and communities. He went further still: ‘In course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community – because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalees, Madrasis and so on – will vanish,’ he said. ‘Indeed, if you ask me, this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain freedom and independence, and but for this we would have been free peoples long, long ago.’40 These were peculiar words from the man who had long hindered independence precisely by reinforcing the division between Hindu and Muslim, and add weight to the theory that Jinnah may have been less serious about Pakistan as a Muslim homeland than as a playing piece. Perhaps, all along, he had pursued not an Islamic state, but rather a non-Hindu-majority state.

And this:

The circumstances changed quickly for, on 11 September 1948, Mohammad Ali Jinnah finally succumbed to his illness. He had been on his way to Karachi. Fatima remembered him speaking in delirium: ‘Kashmir … Give them … the right … to decide … Constitution … I will complete it … soon … Refugees … give them … all assistance … Pakistan.’ According to his doctor, Jinnah saw Liaquat and told him that Pakistan was ‘the biggest blunder of my life’. Further yet, he declared: ‘If now I get an opportunity I will go to Delhi and tell Jawaharlal to forget about the follies of the past and become friends again.’ It is impossible to prove whether Jinnah actually said these words or not; either way, he was to have no further opportunity for a rapprochement. He was taken from the airport to the Governor General’s house in an ambulance, which broke down after four miles on a main road in the middle of a refugee settlement with traffic honking by. The heat sizzled, flies buzzing around the Quaid-e-Azam’s ashen face as Fatima attempted to fan them away. It was an hour before another ambulance could be found. Jinnah was taken back to Government House, where Fatima watched him sleep for about two hours. ‘Oh, Jin,’ she remembered thinking, ‘if they could pump out all my blood, and put it in you, so that you may live.’ He woke one final time and whispered to her ‘Fati, khuda hafiz.… la ilaha il Allah … Mohammad … rasul … Allah.’ His head slumped to the right. He had died with the confession of faith just past his lips.

A wonderful, wonderful book.

Standard
Books

2015 Post 8: Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah

Pal Pablo had been telling me about a TV series called Gomorrah. I had seen the movie listed on Netflix and after adding it to my list, obviously, I never went back to it again. “Breaking Bad crossed with The Sopranos, but even better” was his pitch. I wanted to ask him how it rated against The Wire, but I was too afraid to hear the answer so the question remained unasked.

It did not come as a surprise to see that Gomorrah was based on a book; what was surprising was that Roberto Saviano had not written a novel, as I had thought earlier, but an eyewitness account of sorts. It is a book about crime; more specifically, it is about how the dealings of the Italian crime syndicate, the Camorra have seeped into nearly every pore of Neapolitan society. Saviano’s writing describes the criminal empire in words that awaken goose-flesh, beginning with an explosive visual description.

They looked like mannequins, but when they hit the ground, their heads split open, as if their skulls were real. And they were. Men, women and even a few children, came tumbling out of the container. All dead. Frozen, stacked one on top of another, packed like sardines.

The book slithers through history and geography in a very unassuming manner. Saviano talks about the many fingers of the Camorra and the various pies they are dipped into – fashion, drugs, weapons, cement, even garbage disposal. There is a broad cast of characters, almost overwhelmingly so, with names of different Camorristas across time periods, their nicknames, and the acts that brought them notoriety. Sometimes accompanied by the whys of it all.

Carmine Schiavone recounts that they had Salzillo sit at the head of the table, in honor of his uncle. All of a sudden, Sandokan started to strangle him while his cousin and his cohorts held him by the legs and arms. Sandokan could have killed him with a gun or a knife to the stomach, the way the old bosses used to. But no. He had to do it with his hands: that’s the way the new sovereign kills the old one when he usurps the throne. Ever since 1345 when Andrew of Hungary was strangled in Aversa, the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by his wife, Queen Joan I, and the Neapolitan nobles loyal to Charles, Duke of Durazzo, who aspired to the throne, strangulation around here has been a symbol of succession, of the violent turnover of sovereignty. Sandokan had to show all the bosses that he was the heir, that, by right of viciousness, he was the new leader.

My favorite part of the book deals with a Camorrista’s obsession with Mikhail Kalashnikov – he finally did get to see the man and gave him a box of mozzarella from Naples. By that time, Kalashnikov a retired general who sort of lived off the glory of creating the most efficient killing machine of all time. How efficient?

Nothing in the world—organic or synthetic, metal or chemical—has produced more deaths than the AK-47. It has killed more than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than HIV, more than the bubonic plague, more than malaria, more than all the attacks by Islamic fundamentalists, more than the total of all the earthquakes that have shaken the globe. An exponential amount of human flesh, impossible to even imagine. Only one image came anywhere close to a convincing description, an advertisement at a convention: fill a bottle with sugar by pouring the grains from a small hole in the corner of the bag. Each grain of sugar is someone killed by a Kalashnikov….To calculate the state of human rights, the analysts consider the price of an AK-47. The less it costs, the more human rights violations there are, an indication that civil rights are gangrening and the social structure is falling to pieces. In western Africa, an AK-47 can cost as little as $50. And in Yemen it is possible to find second-or thirdhand weapons for as low as six dollars.

Of course, there is an ample amount of black humor throughout the book, despite the matter-of-fact telling. It does make me wonder how much nuance is lost in translation.

Mariano spent the entire morning at Kalashnikov’s house. The Russian who introduced him must have been quite influential for the general to treat him so warmly. The video camera was running as they sat at the table and a tiny, elderly lady opened the Styrofoam box of mozzarella. They ate with relish. Vodka and mozzarella. Mariano wanted to record it all, so he set the camera at the head of the table. He wanted proof that General Kalashnikov ate the mozzarella from his boss’s dairy. In the background the lens also captured a piece of furniture covered with framed photos of children.

“Mariano, Kalashnikov has that many children and grandchildren?”

“They’re not his children! They’re all photos people send him of children named after him, people whose lives were saved by a Kalashnikov or who simply admire him.”

Like doctors who put pictures of children they have treated on their office shelves as mementos of their professional success, General Kalashnikov had photographs of children named after his creature in his living room. A well-known guerrilla fighter with the Popular Liberation Movement in Angola once told an Italian reporter, “I named my son Kalash because it is synonymous with liberty.”

Speaking of mozzarella, this segment in the section on the Camorra’s methods of waste disposal in Italy made me want to avoid milk for the rest of my life.

Near Villaricca the carabinieri identified a piece of land where paper towels from hundreds of dairy farms in the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, and Lombardy had been dumped: towels used for cleaning cow udders. Farmhands have to clean the udders constantly—two, three, four times a day—every time they attach the suction cups of the automatic milker. As a result the cows often develop mastitis and similar diseases and begin to secrete pus and blood. They’re not allowed to rest, however. Their udders are simply cleaned every half hour so that the pus and blood do not get into the milk and ruin an entire can. Maybe it was just my imagination, or perhaps the heaps of yellowish udder paper distorted my senses, but they smelled like sour milk. The fact is that the trash, accumulated over decades, has reconfigured the horizons, created previously nonexistent hills, invented new odors, and suddenly restored lost mass to mountains devoured by quarries.

Through the facts and the hearsay, there is Saviano’s cynical observations on the human condition in his homeland.

In Naples cruelty is the most complex and affordable strategy for becoming a successful businessman. The air of the city smells like war, you can breathe it through every pore; it has the rancid odor of sweat, and the streets have become open-air gyms for training to ransack, plunder, and steal, for exercising the gymnastics of power, and the spinning of economic growth.

The economic power of the Camorra System lies exactly in its continual turnover of leaders and criminal choices. One man’s dictatorship is always brief; if the power of a boss were long-lasting, he would raise prices, create a monopoly, making rigid markets, and keep investing in the same sectors rather than exploring new ones. Instead of adding value in the criminal economy, he would become an obstacle to business. And so, as soon as a boss takes over, others ready to take his place start to emerge, figures eager to expand, to stand on the shoulders of the giants they helped create. Something that the journalist Riccardo Orioles, one of the most astute observers of power dynamics, always remembered: “Criminality is not power pure and simple, but one kind of power.” There will never be a boss who wants a seat in government. If the Camorra had all the power, its business, which is essential to the workings of the legal and illegal scale, would not exist. In this sense every arrest and maxi-trial seems more like a way of replacing capos and breaking business cycles than something capable of destroying a system.

There are nuggets of history revealed throughout the book, like this mention of the other book about Italian crime families that also starts with a “G”.

Mario Puzo’s inspiration was not a Sicilian but Alfonso Tieri, boss of Pignasecca in downtown Naples, who became the head of the leading Italian Mafia families in the United States after the death of Charles Gambino. In an interview for an American newspaper, Antonio Spavone ‘o malommo, or “bad man,” the Neapolitan boss linked to Tieri, stated, “If the Sicilians showed how to keep their mouths shut, the Neapolitans showed the world how to behave when you’re in command. To convey with a gesture that commanding is better than fucking.” Most of the criminal archetypes, the acme of Mafia charisma, were from a few square miles of Campania. Even Al Capone was originally from here; his family came from Castellammare di Stabia. Capone was the first boss to measure himself against the movies. His nickname, Scarface, from a scar on his cheek, was used by Brian De Palma for his 1983 film about Tony Montana, but Howard Hawks had used it previously for his 1932 movie about Capone. Capone and his escort would show up on the set every time there was an action scene or location shot he could watch. The boss wanted to make sure that Tony Camonte, the Scarface character he inspired, did not become trite. But he also wanted to make sure he was as much like Tony Camonte as possible; he knew that after the film’s release, Camonte would become the emblem of Capone, rather than the other way around.

Overall, a fantastic read. I will check out the movie and TV series soon, just to see how they storify the book’s non-linear, informational narrative.

Standard