Sri Lanka It's Happening

July 15, 2004

The Sicilian is my favourite opening in Chess but this book is not about chess but a novel - a novel by Mario Puzo. Of course it's an old book, I bought it long ago and had it sitting in a book shelf for so many years before I finally got around to reading it. Surely you have such books in your own library.

I recall reading another book by the same author that had some unkind comments on the movie industry (was it in the god father? I really can't remember). So Mario Puzo will be very familiar with the phrase 'stretching a gag' well this is it. The Sicilian is one book too many about the Coreleone family.

Of course the main character in the novel isn't a coreleone by a bandit named Guillane the plot is very far fetched in most places and same goes for the narration, I found myself skimming rather than reading more in some pages.

In one really far fectched segment, we are told of how our hero Guillane is distributing some of his ill gotten gains among the poor - ok fair enough there have been enough robin hood types in reall life.
But isn't it too much of a coincidence that on the very day that he is acting the good samaritan that he runs into a small girl and boy crying buying the road side because their money has been taken away by a crooked policemen? You are willing to fogive that? ok fine but seven years on, when the little girl has grown up guillane marries her.

Isn't it very convinient that his mistress just happens to want to go away to florence a few months before this happens for no reason?

I really liked the God Father and Fools die by the same author. I have often felt that many authors when they achieve stardom, go and dig up their manuscripts that they themselves had previously thrown away when they were writing for the sake of writing as been below par.

Posted by raditha at July 15, 2004 12:09 PM