The author of the book is a tattoo artist who used to work in my tiny
Italian town. The novel/memoir was an incredible success story in Italy
(published by Einaudi) six years ago. Back then I resisted the urge to read it,
but I was forced to pick it up when I found it selling in Fopp for a couple of
pounds (I didn’t feel particularly guilty about reading the book in an English
translation, since I assume it was heavily edited also in its original Italian
version).
For the first couple of hundred pages, the book is a vividly interesting
portrayal of Siberian criminals in Transnistria. After that, however, the
reader gets the idea: the criminals are ruthless but adhere to a very strict
code of moral values. And the book just gets fairly boring. In addition to that, I have enough of romantic portrayals of mobsters with an etiquette (there
are enough books and movies about the Italian mafia for that).
To top it all up, I just had the feeling that, in this fictionalized
auto-biography, the author of the book was painting himself to be way cooler,
smarter, and more skilled than he actually is in reality. I often felt that he
was lying and just recounting the stories of his friends and of the people he
had grown up around as if they were his own. Something which is totally fine by
me, but that I believe could get him severely punished according to the moral
code he spends more than 400 pages describing.
