Frank Viviano: Blood washes blood

By MARGIE THOMSON*

This is my kind of book: a real-life murder mystery from long ago, a colourful family saga spanning the old world of Sicily and the New World of America, the Mafia, and bloody politics spattered over more than a century.

Not only that, but mixing with all this lovely history is the author's own life as a kind of 20th-century nomad, an American, Paris-based correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle who is always touching down at some of this generation's most dangerous places, almost getting killed in Sarejevo, covering two dozen wars and revolutions in half that number of years.

He is a man who needs some kind of redemption from rootlessness and carelessness, and who seeks it in the pages of this extraordinary book by reaching into his own family's past in order to learn, quite literally, about himself.

For this is a true story - or as true as Viviano, a tough, experienced journalist, can make it.

He is one who knows that the past is always reflected somehow in the present. In 1876, on a crossroads in Sicily, his great-great-grandfather - a highwayman who bore the same name as his journalist descendant, Francesco Paolo Viviano, but who was known for mysterious reasons as The Monk - was himself ambushed, shot to death by a man whom, in his dying moments, he recognised.

Who was the assailant, and what does it matter anyway? Most satisfyingly, it turns out that it does matter, that this murder from so long ago has strong resonance in the life of the author.

But Viviano's quest is a long one - it takes him several years of research to find the answers he seeks, in part because of the frustratingly relaxed, even obstructive attitude of Sicilians towards opening hours and a certain fear of those who come asking questions, and also because our hero is always having to kick back into current events and dash off to the latest political hot spot.

In the process of his investigation we learn much about late-19th-century Sicily and the upheavals wrought by burgeoning Italian nationalism and the insurgency of Garibaldi's supporters, the birth of the Mafia, and the plight of that blood-drenched island today; as well as the struggle of poor Italian immigrants to make it in America, and the hold that their traditions continue to have on them, even in the New World.

If there is anything slightly confusing about this book, it is the repetition of names throughout the generations, which produces mind-bending problems as one tries to keep the different people separate in order to follow the story.

This, of course, produced the same problems for Viviano as he spent countless hours poring over ancient village records.

In the end, though, confusion between the generations is not a bad metaphor for Sicilian life, where tradition and habit have overwhelming meaning and present and past keep turning in on themselves.

Viviano, by returning to the Sicilian village where all his grandparents were born, is simply demonstrating that the path between present and past is re-beaten by each generation. A wonderfully satisfying read.

Century

$34.95

* Margie Thomson is the Herald deputy books editor.