Italian fashion crimes

When I saw the headline Fashion crimes on this week's table of contents in the TLS newsletter, I immediately thought of Italian crime fiction expert extraodinaire, Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) of Crime Scraps, whose fiendish and comprehensive understanding of the country's crime psychology (dentistry pales in comparison) is second to nobody's, and that includes Italians. (See here for a typical Norman post, but there are many others of this ilk at Crime Scraps.) The TLS article so titled is a review of Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano, translated by Virginia Jewiss (Macmillan UK; Farrar, Straus & Giroux US). I've read reviews of this book before, but this is a particularly good one.

Gomorrah is, according to the TLS review, "the product of several years of investigative journalism in Naples and the Caserta area of southern Italy by a young journalist (born in 1979). Its greatest merit is to show in meticulous detail how the organized crime syndicate in the region, Camorra, has been able to forge relationships of mutual cooperation with a sizeable section of the local and national economies, and how legal and illegal production intersect and support each other. The book aspires to be, and fully succeeds in being, a work of literature: it is written in the first person, in a raw, unadorned yet highly elaborate style. The reader is invited to read Gomorrah as the personal memoir of a young man who cannot turn his analytic gaze away from the evil he grew up with. In Italy, the book has become a literary phenomenon and won a major literary prize. The author is a now a marked man."

The story is of how the famous fashion houses use fixers "to contract out the production of their designs to dressmaking sweatshops in the Neapolitan area", with all kinds of horrible twists and warped systems that have evolved around this apparently simple, if unedifying, practice. Just read the review, and believe it if you dare (will you ever wear one of those £x,000 off-the-shoulder numbers again afterwards?). As the TLS reviewer, Federico Varese (Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford)  concludes: "No matter how much individual valour anti-Mafia campaigners display, the nexus of self-interest that links sizeable sections of the economy and organized crime must be weakened and eventually broken."  Professor Varese himself has a book coming out later this year called Mob and Mobility.

Comments

[Clare D]

Sounds fascinating, Maxine - another for the Amazon shopping basket. I am always astonished how everything I read about Italy seems to have Mafia involvement. The latest is rubbish collecting in Naples (or lack thereof). Apparently there was some Mafia racket going on there too...

[Norm]

I am ashamed to admit after the wonderful but undeserved build up you gave me I have not read this book.
I better hurry over to Amazon and actually buy the book.