Saraceno [Hardcover]

Djelloul Marbrook (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 2005

Billy Salviati just wants to be a good soldier, to follow orders and live under the radar. It's all going well until he meets Hettie Warshaw one night on a dark street in Hell's Kitchen. Then his life unravels. Saraceno is the story of a hit man whose good looks are equalled only by his magical gift for friendship. He survives the vicissitudes of good looks, but his gift for friendship puts him in the crosshairs of friends and enemies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This lyrical and violent, funny and sad, hot and cool novella haunts us. Try it." --Ann LaFarge, Taconic Weekend

"...an admirable first novel." --Paul Smart, Woodstock Times

"...a mature artist whose rich body of work is finally coming to light." --Brent Robison, editor, Prima Materia

From the Inside Flap

Billy Salviati just wants to be a good soldier, to follow orders and live under the radar. It's all going well until he meets Hettie Warshaw one night on a dark street in Hell's Kitchen. Then his life unravels. 'Saraceno' is the story of a hit man whose good looks are equalled only by his magical gift for friendship. He survives the vicissitudes of good looks, but his gift for friendship puts him in the cross hairs of friends and enemies.

When Mafia don John Altobene dubs Billy Il Saraceno (sah-ra-CHAY-no), it's a compliment. He means Billy is shadowy, deadly and enigmatic. He also means Billy is a man born outside looking in, a marked man, as well as, in Mafia parlance, a made man. Billy roams Manhattan's streets as the Arabs have roamed their deserts, unaccustomed to giving or getting quarter. He's invaluable, but misunderstood. His mother's Irish blood puts him outside La Famiglia.

To the Sicilians, who enjoyed a long period of prosperity and peace under Saracen rule before the Norman conquest, Billy's nickname has unique connotations. In their collective unconscious they do not remember the Saracens the way the rest of the West views them to this day: marauders, Hagar's children, theirhand raised against everyone, and everyone's hand raised against them.

Billy's story, drawn from the author's own boyhood experience in Hell's Kitchen, is an allegory for our time: we don't really know anyoneâ€"we only think we do.

"... an entirely new variety of gangster tale... follows a Mafia hit man and his closest friend, the aristocratic grandson of the godfather, as each searches for his true path... the kind of writer I take real pleasure in discovering... a mature artist whose rich body of work is finally coming to light... weaves bright strands of alchemy, art, literature and religion into a dark Hell’s Kitchen fabric... an unlikely artifact: a Mafia story sculpted with the most refined of sensibilities from the clay of high art and philosophy, and then thoroughly suffused with love... first, the mysterious affection of a creator for his creations, a compassion for flawed humanity that drives the best fiction and makes its consumption a healthy activity. Second, it is the love of the characters for one another, from which redemption finally comes. In the same way that Paul Auster used the ‘detective’ persona in his New York trilogy to create works of art that delve into mysteries far deeper than ‘whodunit,’ and as a result got slammed by fans of the genre, so Saraceno takes higher aim, and may not be apreciated by those who prefer their reading tightly pigeonholed."
Brent Robison, editor, Bliss Plot Press and 'Prima Materia', in 'About Town'

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 124 pages
• Publisher: Open Book Press; 1st edition (November 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0973946504
• ISBN-13: 978-0973946505
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,610,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Djelloul Marbrook's first poetry book, 'Far from Algiers' (Kent State University Press, 2008) won the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and the 2010 International Book Award in poetry. His second book of poems is 'Brushstrokes and Glances' (Deerbrook Editions, 2010). Recent poems were published by American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Oberon, Northport Journal, Meadowland Review, The Same, Reed, The Ledge, Poemeleon, Poets Against War, Fledgling Rag, Daylight Burglary, Orbis, Le Zaporogue, Atticus, Long Island Quarterly, ReDactions, Istanbul Literary Review, Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review, Damazine, Perpetuum Mobile, Attic, and Chronogram. 'Artists' Hill,' an excerpt from his unpublished novel, Crowds of One, won the 2008 Literal Latté first prize in fiction. 'Artemisia's Wolf,' a novel, was published by Prakash Books in early 2011. His novel, 'Alice Miller's Room,' was published in 1999 as an e-book by OnlineOriginals.com (UK), the pioneering British e-book publisher and the only one to have a Booker Prize nominee and numerous mainstream press reviews. Bliss Plot Press of Woodstock, NY, recently published his novel, 'Saraceno,' as an e-book on Smashwords.com. His short fiction has been published in Orbis (UK), Potomac Review (Maryland) and Prima Materia (New York). He maintains a lively Facebook presence. A retired newspaper editor and Navy veteran, he lives in Germantown, NY, with his wife Marilyn. During a newspaper career including the The Providence Journal (RI), Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, Baltimore Sun, Winston-Salem Journal, Washington Star, and Media News dailies in Ohio and New Jersey, he won a number of awards for newspaper writing, page design and photography. His career spanned two major transitions in modern journalism, one from hot lead typography to photo-offset and one to the Internet. He blogs frequently about the media, literature and culture at www.djelloulmarbrook.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Hell of a GREAT Read, February 5, 2006

By 

Craig A. Perkins (Chantilly, Virginia USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saraceno (Hardcover)

Mr. Marbrook has a reporter's eye for detail and an editor's gift for language and still he captures the nature of the individual character's speech and thoughts.

Who does not enjoy a great story involving the mafia so please put your tray tables and seats in their upright and locked positions and fasten your seatbelts for when this story takes off and does not land until the last pages.

I immensely enjoyed this work and I am sure most will find it not only fun but thought provoking.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It starts slow and ends too fast!, March 9, 2006

By 

Daniel Wilson (Severna park, Marfyland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saraceno (Hardcover)

First, allow me to say that I do not consider myself a "well-read" person. I think I am of slightly above average when compared to my constituents of equal education, but moreover what attracts people to me and I to them, is mostly my philosophy of "goodwill toward men".

I like books of drama and inter-weaving plots, mostly non-fiction.

As a kid:

Charles Dickens
Mark Twain
Jack London
Jules Verne
Victor Appleton 11
Herman Melville

As an adult:

D. H. Lawrence
Sloan Wilson
Clive Cussler
Tom Clancey
(And now) Djelloul Marbrook

When I read Djelloul Marbrook's book, I had trouble out of the gate. My vocabulary fell short of his and I decided early on that I would plod forward without it and come back later to retrieve the broken parts.

Good thing I did, for if I had not, I would have lost momentum.

Before long, I grew accustomed to his writing style. It became fluid to me and I found that his pictorial descriptions and extraordinary depth of vision made more and more sense. The characters were difficult to keep tract of at first, but that too became easier as I relaxed and "let it happen". By the end of the book, I couldn't put it down (always a good sign to me) and I was sorry but relieved when I caressed the last page.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saraceno by Djelloul Marbrook, March 1, 2006

By 

BRUCE "BHJ" (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Saraceno (Hardcover)

Saraceno draws the reader into the world of immigrant Sicilians in the first half of the twentieth century. It's a world of Prohibition and hard times. The author captures the patois and gestures language of the sub-culture so well. Not surprisingly, Djelloul Marbrook spent much of his youth in contact with Sicilian immigrants on the sidewalks of Hell's Kitchen on Manhattan's west side. Apparently the book is highly autobiographical, drawing on anecdotal memories of real people. The author's ethnographic style is reminiscent of Burgess' Clockwork Orange.

In the process of reading Saraceno we learn a lot about Sicilian history and culture and how that rich ethnic tradition translated into American materialism and hedonism on the streets of New York. Marbrook offers up a rich slice of Americana.