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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vendetta!, 20 May 2004
This novel of a current-day criminal family, the Apriles, spans the range between the old Sicilian model and the modern world of big money from high finance. Don Aprile correctly anticipates that the legitimate world will be more profitable and safer. To prepare, his children are launched into totally legitimate activities (the army, television, and law) from birth and protected from knowing about Don Aprile's activities. But as a favor to an old friend, Don Aprile has become the sponsor of a young man who he treats as a nephew and prepares to become a man of honor in the Sicilian tradition. All proceeds according to plan until three years after Don Aprile's retirement from crime when he struck down by assassins while leaving the confirmation of his grandchild.Astorre Viola, the nephew, has promised to protect the Don's family and to keep the family's legitimate banking business from being sold. The plot that causes the Don's death is related to a rival faction wanting the banks to launder drug and other sources of illegal money. The plot centers around Astorre's emergence as a leader of the vendetta, protector of the family, and as a man finding his purpose in life. To do so, he has to find the killers and unwind the hidden path to those who hired them. Aided by the Don's old friends to help run the bank and give him advice on the vendetta, he grows in stature and confidence. Having unraveled the mystery, he then sets the jackels at each other's throats in a fascinatingly Machiavellian way. The characters are rich and complex. Although this is a novel about crime, Puzo inserted fascinating personal quirks in almost every character. Astorre finds himself irresistibly attracted to the Don's daughter as a teenager and is sent off to Sicily by the Don to separate them. Later, he falls in love with a woman who can perfectly feign being in love with rich men who give her presents. At other times, Astorre acts against the code of the crime family by sparing lives. He is keeping a promise throughout, rather than acting out of personal conviction. His joys are simple ones, and he seeks ways to recapture them in the fullness of his maturity. Eventually, he learns of his own patrimony as the son of another Don in Sicily. The "good guys" are hopelessly conflicted and seriously compromised either by their own greed or by the slippery morals of their superiors. Even those who don't make it through the book provide lots of interesting characterizations, including the twin brother hit men and the broker who hires them. But, best of all, Puzo has a sense of humor and he uses it to create contradictions that can only be resolved in unusual and humorous ways. Every scene in this book has amazingly visual qualities, and should translate well into the promised movie based on this book. Puzo deftly moves back and forth between the United States and Sicily to draw the contrast between the old and the new. It turns out that some of the key people in the new world have ties to the old, as well. This is also an attractive connection to the prior two books. Other than enjoying a fast-paced story, what can one learn here? The continuing lesson for me was how people create problems for themselves by imagining that things are different then they are: our familiar old friend, the misconception stall. If they had taken the time to investigate more carefully before leaping, their lives would all have been simpler and happier. Puzo is warning us to look at ourselves and our ideas objectively if we are to achieve what we really want. Otherwise, we are doomed to act like robots, responding foolishly in knee-jerk fashion to the environment around us, rather than being the independent people we can be in creating our own futures. As such, we only provide amusement for objective observers.
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