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WORK TITLE: Suburra
WORK NOTES: with Giancarlo De Cataldo
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 3/4/1967
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Italian
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/suburra-carlo-bonini-giancarlo-de-cataldo-yesterday-felicia-yap-ravenhill-john-steele-codename-villanelle-luke-jennings-review-0rnwgkkbx
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 4, 1967.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, and investigative journalist.
WRITINGS
Suburra has been adapted as a Netflix feature film (2015) and has inspired a Netflix TV series prequel (2017).
SIDELIGHTS
Carlo Bonini is a writer and journalist. He is on the staff of the Italian national daily, La Repubblica and has written books on topics such as international terrorism and politics. He is also the author of several novels.
Among Anglophone readers, De Cataldo is perhaps best known for the novel Suburra. Written with Giancarlo De Cataldo, Suburra exposes the rampant criminality that lies not far beneath the surface of life in Rome during the latter days of Silvio Berlusconi’s tenure as prime minister. As the city seethes with violence, much of it motivated by anger at the corruption that dominates politics, Rome’s leading crime families are scheming to build a luxury waterfront development in Ostia, Rome’s seaport. Situated on the Tyrrhenian coast approximately fourteen miles from central Rome, Ostia is a popular resort community, and was incorporated into an administrative division of Rome in 1976. The planned development will give Rome’s participating Mafia families complete control of Ostia and its port facilities, making it easy for them to smuggle drugs and other illegal materials into and out of the country.
The leader of these crime families is a mysterious figure known as Samurai. Opposing him is police officer Marco Malatesta, who as a rebellious youth had been a member of Samurai’s gang. In those days, Samurai had posed as something of a Robin Hood figure, claiming that violent acts were a justifiable response to social injustice. Soon enough, however, Marco had discovered that Samurai cared nothing about the plight of the downtrodden, and wanted only to increase his own power. The disillusioned Marco, hiding the fact of his previous association with the gangster, was admitted to Rome’s police force and rose through the ranks to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
The novel begins when Pericle Malgradi, a Berlusconi-esque politician, attempts to cover up the drugs-related death of a Lithuanian prostitute whose services he had just enjoyed at a luxury Rome hotel. A porter at the hotel attempts to blackmail Malgradi, and is assassinated by a hitman. The porter’s family then retaliates, and it appears that a full-blown gang war is about to erupt. With the help of a righteous magistrate, Michelangelo de Candia, and working with left-wing activist Alice Savelli, Marco discovers the Mafia’s secret scheme and its ties to the murders. Realizing that Samurai is the one who is behind it all, Marco sets out to catch the elusive mastermind and put an end to his reign of violence and corruption.
Reviewers admired Suburra as both a thrilling crime story and a portrait of Rome’s sordid underbelly. Corruption taints every level of the city, from the Vatican to the legislature, from the police department to the courts, from business owners to local gangs and major crime lords. Drugs, sex scandals, bribery, intimidation, collusion, blackmail, and murder are commonplace. As a reviewer put it in Crime Fiction Lover, “corruption and blood fill the pages [of this novel] like a plague” and create a hyper-realistic atmosphere reminiscent of the work of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. Noting that Rome itself, “in all its history, glory, and despair, is skillfully sewn into the fiber of the tale,” a Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded that Suburra contains so much nastiness that “it’s hard to muster up much hope for Rome itself.” A writer for Publishers Weekly, on the other hand, praised the authors’ skill in using “genre formulas to provide an unflinching look at real-life widespread corruption in Italy.”
Ian Thomson, writing in New Statesman, emphasized the novel’s barely-disguised condemnation of Berlusconi and his enduring but toxic influence on Italian society. Thomson noted that a murder scene in Suburra bears strong similarities to the 1975 murder of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, adding that the novel “is fraught with such allusions to Pasolini and his newspaper attacks on political corruption.” Thomson further noted evident parallels between the character of Samurai and an actual Roman mobster, Massimo Carminati, who was known as “the last king of Rome” and who–like his fictional counterpart–collected modern art and enjoyed drinking lapsang souchong tea as he planned various murders. In addition, the reviewer identified Suburra‘s debts to the 2013 film La Grande Bellezza, which depicts Rome as reduced to decadence because of Berlusconi, and to the work of Italy’s “young cannibal” writers who draw on tropes from video games, graphic novels, and kung-fu videos to “conjure a spiritually empty, disaffected modern Italy.” Concluding the review, Thomson said of Suburra: “I have not read such a blistering, grimly absorbing satire of Rome’s kickback and bribery culture in years.”
Suburra was adapted as a feature film in 2015. The novel also served as inspiration for a popular Netflix-produced TV series, Suburra: Blood on Rome, a prequel to the film.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2017, review of Suburra.
Library Journal May 15, 2007, Robert Perret, review of Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror, p. 102.
New Statesman, September 22, 2017, Ian Thomson, reveiw of Suburra, p. 65.
Publishers Weekly June 19, 2017, review of Suburra, p. 94.
ONLINE
Crime Fiction Lover, https://crimefictionlover.com/ (April 11, 2018 ), review of Suburra.
Carlo Bonini is an Italian writer and journalist for the Italian national daily, La Repubblica.
Bonini, Carlo: SUBURRA
Kirkus Reviews. (July 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Bonini, Carlo SUBURRA Europa Editions (Adult Fiction) $18.00 8, 22 ISBN: 978-1-60945-407-4
Rome is a hotbed of political corruption, violence, and scheming at the end of Silvio Berlusconi's reign as prime minister in this modern Mafia novel.Some of the most powerful Mafia families in town, led by a shadowy figurehead known as Samurai, are taking advantage of the unrest to hatch a multibillion dollar plan to build a luxury waterfront development that will also give them full control of the nearby port of Ostia. But Mafia egos are notoriously delicate, and, inevitably, murder will undercut the spirit of "family" cooperation. The novel begins with a politician covering up the death of a prostitute he's just had sex with, which leads a relatively unimportant gang member to overestimate his power. When he ends up murdered, the response from his family is swift. In the middle of this vicious quagmire stands one smart and noble Carabinieri, Marco Malatesta, himself a product of the violent streets. With help from the magistrate Michelangelo de Candia and a firebrand leftist named Alice Savelli, Marco not only uncovers the complex plans and the murders at their heart, but also sets his sights on Samurai, determined to catch the puppet master once and for all. The novel is set in a very specific time, and it is a novel of Rome, meaning that the city itself, in all its history, glory, and despair, is skillfully sewn into the fiber of the tale. At the same time, there is something old-fashioned about the narrative, because it clearly evokes Mario Puzo's famous trilogy and other classics of the genre. It can be hard to keep track of all the characters, but loose ends are admirably tied up in the end. While the complex plot intrigues, there is so much violence, so much dirty scheming, that even when the "good guys" win, it's hard to muster up much hope for Rome itself.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bonini, Carlo: SUBURRA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497199826/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8da31852. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497199826
Suburra
Publishers Weekly. 264.25 (June 19, 2017): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Suburra
Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo, trans, from the Italian by Antony Shugaar. Europa, $18 trade paper (400p) ISBN
978-160-945-407-4
In 1993, 18-year-old Marco Malatesta, the hero of this fast-moving crime thriller from journalist Bonini and novelist De Cataldo (The Father and the Foreigner), was a "hoodlum from Talenti with plenty of heart." He followed a gang leader known as Samurai, who asserted that certain acts considered criminal by the bourgeoisie such as theft and assault were appropriate responses to an inadequate justice system. But after realizing that Samurai was merely interested in consolidating his own power, Marco broke with him and joined the police. With his past a closely held secret, Marco rose through the ranks and eventually became a lieutenant colonel. In the present, an outbreak of violence in Rome appears to be the initial stage of a full-fledged Mafia gang war that Samurai might be involved in. When a massacre confirms Marco's suspicion that Samurai is involved, the policeman is sidelined, forcing him to be creative in his pursuit of justice. The authors effectively use genre formulas to provide an unflinching look at real-life widespread corruption in Italy. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Suburra." Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 94. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643872/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c49e577f. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496643872
Bonini, Carlo & Giuseppe D'Avanzo. Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror
Robert Perret
Library Journal. 132.9 (May 15, 2007): p102.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Bonini, Carlo & Giuseppe D'Avanzo. Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror. Melville House. 2007. c.256p. index. ISBN 978-1-933633-27-5. $23.95. INT AFFAIRS
Italian investigative journalists Bonini and D'Avanzo (La Republica, Rome) broke the "Nigergate" story involving the false intelligence about Niger-supplied uranium to Iraq, which the Bush administration used to justify its war. Their book on the same subject can be described only as "true spy." With its descriptions of clothing and scenery, story arcs, jumps among players, and thrillerlike pace, it reads like a novel, but the many footnotes and endnotes make clear that this is nonfiction about current events. Nonetheless, spy fiction fans will be drawn into the compelling true story, while students will find this a more than palatable read on the Nigergate scandal. More serious investigators may wish to go back to the original news stories (those by these authors would be in Italian, of course), as there is a dearth of books about Nigergate. But this is an excellent fit for public libraries with current events or espionage devotees; academic libraries will have to balance its popular tone against their need for complete coverage of the current war.--Robert Perret, Univ. of Wyoming Lib., Laramie
Perret, Robert
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Perret, Robert. "Bonini, Carlo & Giuseppe D'Avanzo. Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror." Library Journal, 15 May 2007, p. 102. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A164422278/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9db39ca2. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A164422278
The last king of Rome
Ian Thomson
New Statesman. 146.5385 (Sept. 22, 2017): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Suburra
Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo
Translated by Antony Shugaar
Europa Editions, 528pp. 11.99 [pounds sterling]
Silvio Berlusconi, that slyboots politician, used his own television channels to spread propaganda for his Forza Italia ("Let's Go Italy!") party and, along the way, established a "videocracy" such as the world has never seen. His ten years in power provided lurid entertainment for the masses (boobs, football, lottery) as well as patronage for family and friends.
Today more than ever, Italians are weighed down by debts and doubts, as are all Europeans. Yet each of the Berlusconi governments managed to survive through a very Italian flair for crisis management. ("How's your crisis going?" President Reagan once asked the country's then prime minister Bettino Craxi in 1985. "Very well, thank you," came the wry reply.) Forza Italia's supremo was in many ways the embodiment of furbizia--cunning, foxiness. By placing family, business and bunga-bunga parties before the concerns of government he made Italy prey to sinister financiers: increasingly during the early 2000s, political power was sought, not for Italy's common good, but for nefarious purposes.
Suburra, a razor-sharp political thriller set during the dying days of Berlusconi's regime in the year 2011--and first published in Italian in 2013--unfolds largely on Rome's outskirts. In the borgate (townships) of Ostia, Centocelle, Cinecitta and Tiburtina, small-time thugs collaborate with hoodlum bankers and property wheeler-dealers to pull off a multi-billion-dollar scam to build a luxury waterfront development in Ostia port. Just as in 1975 the Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was found beaten beyond recognition and run over by his own car outside Ostia, now here a couple of low-lifers have been murdered in a "Pasolini-style execution" in the same shanty town. The book is fraught with such allusions to Pasolini and his newspaper attacks on political corruption and lends itself to film treatment; already it has been adapted for a Netflix series, available from 6 October.
The authors, Rome-based journalist Carlo Bonini and magistrate-novelist Giancarlo De Cataldo, anticipate the "Mafia Capital" investigations in Rome that, in 2014, revealed the city as a sinkhole of greed and corruption. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a group of Berlusconi-affiliated politicians and former right-wing activists had begun to make a fortune by co-opting migrants and gypsies into loan-sharking, fraud and money-laundering businesses. Among those eventually imprisoned as a result of the investigations was Massimo Carminad, "the last king of Rome", a gangland mobster with a taste for samurai swords and Tom Ford suits.
The plot of Suburra, fast-paced and brutal, thrills from the get-go. A politician called Pericle Malgradi (part based on Berlusconi) is trying to cover up the death-by-drugs of a Lithuanian prostitute with whom he has just had sex in a plush Rome hotel. ("Suburra" is the Latin name for ancient Rome's red-light district.) The hotel's Albanian-born night porter seeks to blackmail the Honourable Malgradi, only to be bumped off by a hit man. So begins a gang war that involves a cast of "steroid-swollen" bouncers, escort girls in latex dresses, bent city commissioners, councilmen and Vatican yes-men. Hovering over them is the shadowy, Carminati-esque master criminal known as "Samurai", who likes to drink cups of lapsang souchong tea while deliberating cold-blooded murder.
Like Carminati, Samurai owns works by Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, and has read his Ezra Pound, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and other right-leaning authors. His background in neo-fascist militancy is made manifest in a "recreational club" situated in the unlovely borgata of Monte Sacro, where kids use Zippo lighters adorned with the silhouette of II Duce and the fascist anthem "Faccetta nera" is a ring tone. (It was from just such a murky Black Shirt world that Pasolini's 17-year-old assassin came.)
Suburra has much in common with Paolo Sorrentino's 2013 film La Grande Bellezza, in which Rome is portrayed as a city corrupted into decadence by the work of Berlusconi and his henchmen berlusclones. In the novel's comic-strip exaggerated violence, political rivals are rubbed out in a Mafia-style "balancing of accounts". The novel owes much, too, to the work of Italy's so-called giovani cannibali (young cannibal writers), among them Simona Vinci, Niccolo Ammaniti and Giorgio Vasta, who draw on kung-fu videos, graphic novels and Nintendo games to conjure a spiritually empty, disaffected modern Italy. I have not read such a blistering, grimly absorbing satire of Rome's kickback and bribery culture in years.
Caption: Ruins: Suburra charts Berlusconi-era corruption
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thomson, Ian. "The last king of Rome." New Statesman, 22 Sept. 2017, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509722624/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9e3cea63. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509722624
SUBURRA
August 22, 2017 Written by Philip Rafferty Published in iBook, Kindle, Print, Reviews 0 Permalink
Written by Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo, translated by Antony Shugaar — Rome is said to be the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city yearning. Suburra, the novel by writer team Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo, shows it is also the city of violence, the city of crime, and the city of rampant recreational drug use. The novel first appeared in Italy in 2013, and has now arrived in English thanks to the wonderful translation by Antony Shugaar.
Suburra opens in 1993. A prologue set in the “muggy darkness of a summer night” describes three men poised to rob safety deposit boxes at one of the main branches of the Bank of Rome. They chat, and one tells a story about their boss, Samurai. But after a revealing tale is told and the robbery is successfully pulled off, violence follows and it begets more violence.
The prologue is fantastic and sets the tone for a book where corruption and blood fill the pages like a plague. Bonini and De Cataldo create an atmosphere that feels akin to the work of writer and director Quentin Tarantino. Characters with names like Samurai and Number Eight are bold and fantastically overdrawn and the violence they enact is hyper-real.
We then jump to present day Rome, where the rest of the action takes place. A crooked politician with a penchant for fast living finds himself with a dead prostitute on his hands. He solicits a minor gang member to help him cover it up, and the small time thug attempts to use the power he has over the politician to gain a stronger foothold on the underworld ladder. Instead he winds up dead.
We meet the heroic Marco Malatesta, once a young thug on the streets of Rome now he works for Samurai. But his criminal days are behind him and he has climbed the ranks of the Carabinieri, the national police force, to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Malatesta shows he is fearless right away, and effortlessly handles a bad guy on a train platform just like a big-budget action hero. Soon, however, he’s pulled in for the dead thug’s murder and he suspects it is part of something bigger.
The mafia, corrupt politicians, and a new rogue crime element are all jockeying for control of Ostia, a depressed coastal town just outside Rome. One of these groups aims to turn the area into the Las Vegas of Italy, but not all of them will play by the long established rules and a violent chaos ensues.
The main characters in Suburra are terrifically drawn. The world of whores and crooks, gangsters and crooked politicians, makes this a very packed and compelling novel. There is a lot of plot, and subplot, in the 500 pages of Suburra. The story is big and literary but works hard to maintain the excitement we expect from page-turning crime fiction.
The fast moving action sometimes obscures understanding, and it is easy to get lost. The giant cast of characters can be hard to follow and the intricacies of the plot might leave you scratching your head. When we are with secondary characters, which we don’t know as well, the prose still shines but the excitement wanes. Shades of what is going on can be pulled from the text, but you end up feeling a bit out of the narrative loop. The character list in the opening pages is helpful, but having to refer to it often interrupts the flow.
Despite this, Suburra feels fresh, exciting, and new while simultaneously evoking classics of the epic crime fiction genre like Mario Puzo’s Godfather series, and Richard Price’s Clockers. The writing style is fluid, and the book is gripping enough, even if at times it is confusing. The satisfying ending, where all is tied up, makes up for some of the confusion along the way.
Suburra was made into an award winning Italian film last year, and this October the same production company will expand it into a 10-part Netflix series. With high production values, it will be exciting to see Netflix’s first original series in Italian. The book is definitely worth reading before it airs, and you can watch the trailer below.
Click here for more Italian crime fiction.
Europa Editions
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CFL Rating: 4 Stars