Overview

"Norman Lewis arrives in war-torn Naples as an intelligence officer in 1944. The starving population has devoured all the tropical fish in the aquarium, respectable women have been driven to prostitution and the black market is king. Lewis finds little to admire in his fellow soldiers, but gains sustenance from the extraordinary vivacity of the Italians. There is the lawyer who earns his living bringing a touch of Roman class to funerals, the gynaecologist who ""specializes in the restoration of lost virginity"" and the widowed housewife who times her British lover against the clock. ""Were I given the chance to be born again,"" writes Lewis, ""Italy would be the country of my choice."""

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9781856951494

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Sent as a British Intelligence officer to the world's largest village shortly after the Allied landing at Salerno, Lewis found Naples a place almost beyond civilized imagining. Terrible hunger is everywhere; seeing ten blind orphan girls enter a restaurant to beg for scraps as tears stream down their cheeks, Lewis notes: Until now I had clung to the comforting belief that human beings eventually came to terms with pain and sorrow. Now I understood I was wrong. The trials put to the city are almost biblical: the entire population must be evacuated one afternoon after a report of delayed-action mines planted by the fleeing Germans; and later, as if there wasn't enough trouble, Vesuvius erupts. Cats are being eaten. But as an Intelligence officer occupied mostly with futile swipes at black-marketeering, banditry, prostitution, and corruption, Lewis develops an immediate and profound appreciation of the Italians: there's a way around everything; no one knows anything; things somehow get done. All sorts of things: vendettas, mafioso-rings (Vito Genovese is a honcho in the Allied Military Government), genteel impersonations, face-saving on a grand scale. Miracles are accepted, expected. San Gennaro's blood liquifies on schedule twice a year in the Cathedral; newspaper ads wish the city a good and successful miracle. People who survive so deftly can only be loved, and Lewis loves them. His English reserve provides a humorous tension to what he records, but he was plainly dazzled at all the courage and wiliness. It makes for a fine memoir, the early impressions of a writer later known here for his Mafioso novels Honored Society (1964) and The Sicilian Specialist (1975). (Kirkus Reviews)

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