A rather forbidding title applies also to a cruel, retaliatory game
of chance still played in the Italian port of Manacore,
symbolically as well to the game of life in which the whole village
participates. Around the loves of its feudal patron, Don Cesare, a
man reaching from old age, the author plays off the successive
women he has taken and married off to others of his household or
holdings and so created a small kingdom. There are many
jealousies-of hierarchy, of privilege, of expectations and beyond
the overt emotional tensions, there is a mystery. A robbery has
occurred; the police evade the issue; half truths prevail; and
finally a girl-ostensibly Don Cesare's next victim, plants the
evidence which leads to new accusations and finally Don Cesare's
death... The Prix Goncourt and very successful in France, it is
questionable whether the intricacies of caricature and of
implication will attract an American audience. It is a vertical
section of a society surviving from an earlier age but the brute
instincts of power, money, lust lend their impetus to the
narrative, their universality to its intention. (Kirkus Reviews)
Now back in print, Roger Vailland's atmospheric 1957 novel won the
Prix Goncourt, and the Knopf edition was a selection of the
Book-of-the-Month Club. The grotesque game of the Law, played in
the taverns of southern Italy, is but a shadow of an even fiercer
attitude to life-a potent metaphor for a vigorously hierarchical
view of existence which rules over the mezzogiorno, the noonday
culture of southern Italy. In this novel we are not asked to pardon
or condemn the passion of Donna Lucrezia, the assured
self-centeredness of the learned aristocrat Don Cesare or even the
sinister desires of Matteo Brigante, the controlling godfather.
"The Law is an experience I will not easily forget."-V.S. Naipaul.
"Makes Mario Puzo's works look rather tame."-Antonia Fraser
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