Customer Reviews

The Fortunate Pilgrim

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3 star:		(5)
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Mario Puzo took the everyday life of an ordinary Italian immigrant family and turned it into a masterpiece! A treat for the reader. By the end of the book I felt like I know this family personally. His character depth is amazing. After reading this book I have a much better understanding of what my own grandparents went through when they came over from Italy. Living in today's world filled with conveniences, we tend to forget the struggles of the generations before us. I recommend this book to readers of all ages.

Mario Puzo feels that this novel, written before THE GODFATHER or any of his more popular novels, is superior to them all. In a creative sense, THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM is the parent, and the rest of his books are the offspring.

In the hands of someone like Puzo, the creative process is a wonderful thing to observe. He relates how he set out to write a novel in which he was the hero and the rest of his family were villains who wanted to stifle his writing career; and how, stalwart young man that he was, he succeeded in spite of them and the stumbling blocks they placed in his path. He was unable to write this version of his life, not even as fiction. Truth and the memory of the strength of the woman who reared him wouldn't allow him to deny the impact she had on his life.

Puzo wrote, but not what he had planned, or even what he thought he was writing. At some point he realized that the book wasn't about himself. It was about his mother. THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM's Lucia Santa is the personification of Puzo's mother and this book is her book as surely as if she'd written it herself.

When we read about Lucia Santa's life in Hell's Kitchen, a single mother as we would call her today, as she raises six children, we are constantly amazed at her strength.

Her oldest son becomes a Mafia Union Organizer (read strong arm man and collector of "protection" money) against her will. But Lucia Santa prevails.

Her daughter spends six months in a sanitorium for her lungs and comes home too assimilated for Lucia Santa's taste. But Lucia Santa prevails.

One of her sons commits suicide. But Lucia Santa prevails.

One tragedy follows on the heels of another. But Lucia Santa prevails.

After the death of her son, her neighbors bewail her misfortunes, "First husband dead; second destroyed for life; a grown son, already a breadwinner, struck down. What tragedy, what misfortune!" But how does Lucia Santa look at it? A grown daughter, a forelady with a hard working sober husband. One son who has given her grandchildren and is making a good living. Another son working on the railroad and no longer giving her troubles. Yet another son winning awards in school. Yes, Lucia Santa prevails.

Lucia Santa is, in every way, Puzo's mother. Is it any wonder that she dominates this novel? The choice as to who was the hero (or heroine) was never really Puzo's to make. It's a better novel and a more honest one the way it wrote itself (with a little assist from Puzo).

Puzo says that, not only is this her novel, but so is THE GODFATHER. From his mother's mouth to Puzo's ears, to the written page, we have Lucia Santa to thank for these books. Oh, by the way, Mario, thanks for channeling them for us, the readers.

If you only read one of Puzo's books this probably should be it.

AFter being introduced to the work of the late Mario Puzo by "The Godfather," I was eager to read to another of his works. I had high expectations but did not believe another novel could surpass his most notable and popular book.

"The Fortunate Pilgrim" will forever be the book I think of when I hear and think of Mario Puzo. Just like the quote on the book states, it seems as though he labored over each and every sentence. The story unfolds with each hardship faced by the Angeluzzi-Corbo family, and the strength of it's leader Lucia Santa.

I recommend this book to anyone. The unlikely heroine will forever be engrained in the reader's memory and leave one with a surprising new respect for their own mother as well as Mario Puzo's.

Puzo really takes you back to pre-war "Hells Kitchen". His descriptions are vivid and engaging. Like many of his other books, this one is about family. The reader is shown a struggling mother and her children over a 20 year period. The two female characters (mother and oldest daughter) are truly heroic. It is by their there virtue and perseverance thatt this family can stay together and ultimately prosper. They are the rock that their family and this story are built upon. Its a testament of how stong women can pull a family up by its bootstraps despite the failings of the men.

Puzo's use of Italian (proper, dialect and slang) brings the characters close to home for those readers of Italian-American decent. The vartious Italian-American characters brought back memories of long since past members of my own family.

This book really places your in 1920s-30s new york with all its splendor, virtues, vices and difficulties. It showed me what life was like for my grandparents, aunts and uncles.

This was a very good book that I will read again someday.

As written in the preface by Mario Puzo, this book was his all time favourite. Even though it didn't sell as well as his other blockbusters, readers would sense how personal it was to Mario Puzo. It was written with grace & eloquence and for once, it only briefly touched upon mafioso. Rather, the book emphasised upon the mother of a family, Santa Lucia who went against all odds in a distant land to bring up her family. Through the years, her life was struck by tragedies and yet, she clinged on & persevered through the hard times, including the Great Depression and subsequently, World War 2. Suffice to say that nothing is far fetched in America and your life is what you made it to be. It is still as pertinent today as it was many years ago. Highly recommended.

Although it doesn't have the most compelling start, it doesn't take long to warm up to the family in 'The Fortunate Pilgrim'. This is a sad account of early 1900s America, when being an immigrant was noble instead of criminal. Mario Puzo truly brings their suffering and hardships to life. If you've read 'The Godfather' you could be forgiven for thinking this will be a story of a family's fierce loyalty to each other, despite their shared poverty. Not so. Relationships are strained, affections grow and wither, bonds are strengthened and severed. Like animals, they have to keep fighting the cruel uncertainty of poverty. Puzo dispenses with all sentiment; in order to be sentimental, there has to be some good times along the way. And time is not kind to many of these characters. I've read a couple of entertaining but ultimately shallow Mario Puzo novels ('The Fourth K' and 'Fools Die'), but I won't soon forget the sadness of 'The Fortunate Pilgrim'.

This a a book that can't help but to make you think about what is really important in life. A friend recommended that I read Fortunate Pilgrim. We swapped books. I loaned him German Boy, he loaned me Fortunate Pilgrim.

When you read this book you really see, feel, and almost taste what it was like to be an immigrant in the United States trying to raise a family in the twenties, thirties, and early forties. Make no mistake about it, life can be brutal resulting in one having to make difficult choices and sacrifices. That fact hits you in the face when reading this fine book by Puzo. Life can also be an exciting, rewarding adventure which Puzo also shows very cleary.

In the end this was a book that I can wholeheartedly recommend. The first few pages are kind of so-so, but the more you read, the better you like it. By the end you can't put it down! The only criticism is that I wish there was a small "lexicon" of sorts for the Italian words which the reader may not be familiar with.

Many of you will no doubt be attracted to The Fortunate Pilgrim riding on the fame of Puzo's mafia novels, especially the Godfather. The Fortunate Pilgrim is more of a drama in the traditional sense of the word. It tells the story of Lucia Santa - an immigrant widow living in a small appartment in New York and raising her children. This book exposes the reality of the life of immigrant Italians in all it's harshness, with the very tight budgets and subsistent living, domestic violence, a clash between the traditional Italian values and modern American ones, the generation gap and the temptation of crime.

This is characterized in Lucia's children. The daughter is an assertive, educated type determined to become big in the real world. One of the sons is a womaniser and all-round good guy. The other sons are archetypes of kids growing up during the depression. A moving, though at times slow book.

If you want to see and enjoy a different side of Puzo as a writer, this novel is ideal.

Enjoyed THE FORTUNATE PILGRIM by Mario Puzo, written before
THE GODFATHER . . . this one also looks at the Italian-American
experience, but from the perspective of a family where the woman
holds the power.

I was moved by the story of Lucia Santa and her journey from the
mountain farms of Italy to the streets of New York . . . she hoped
for a better life, but instead found herself living in Hell's Kitchen
and in a bad marriage where she had to raise six children
on her own.

Their lives also fascinated me, as did Puzzo's description of
what like was life in the twenties, thirties and forties . . . it made
me feel like I was actually there--right with the characters.

After the novel was over, I wondered how come it never was
made into a major movie . . . I did found out that THE FORTUNATE
PILGRIM was instead made into a TV mini-series in 1988, starring
Sophia Loren and Edward James Olmos . . . so I now know what
I'll be watching when I rent my next DVD!

This book characterizes the Italian immigrant experience in coming to America as a loss of values in trade for a new life. It describes exactly how one loses the old culture, and the old ways, and thus is assimilated and often destroyed, but how endurance gives one the right to live this new life. I found it an exceptionally vivid description of two generations of life in the New York slums as an Italian immigrant family, and while it was heavy on the drama (deaths, violence, failure) its dominant trait is its complex view of the primary characters. They are both not heroic, and yet stalwarts, and impotent, and yet keeping what they can of a value system alive in a country that tears it apart at every turn with money. I like this book the best of all of Puzo's that I have read, and would recommend it to anyone as simultaneously more literary and more real than his celebrated offer-you-can't-refuse bestsellers.