Customer Reviews

Saraceno

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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.

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.

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.

The characters and their story stay with you long after you put the book down, which is very hard to do once you've started reading. The language is so beautiful that I found myself rereading passages for the beauty of the language.

Djelloul Marbrook creates more than just physical characters. He gets inside their thoughts and inside their emotions. His dialogue paints images as well as a movie camera. Each character has its own spellings for the way they pronounce or mispronounce their own dialects. He includes the reader in the participation of the stories. He makes the reader feel like he is invisibly in the room with these living breathing characters, that the reader must be alert to the next possible physical moves of these real people. I felt like I needed to be alert to be able to jump out of their way.

Everyone loves a good mafia story. This one will grab your heart and not let go. Billy Salviati, the deadly and enigmatic Saraceno-a dark, menacing shadow roaming New York's Sicilian underground-wants only to be a good hit man but finds himself captured by his essential goodness. Billy is a man who wields the cold power of killing efficiently and without remorse: he is a man no one wants to know. But Billy is no match for Hettie Warshaw, a singular old woman alone with her roses and her books who teaches him who he is. He is a man who worships the old don, John Altobene, but finds his brother of the heart in Matt, the erudite grandson of John and another even more treacherous, more shadowy don. He is a man who disdains the women who would bring him down but slowly finds new life in risking a barmaid's love. In the intricacies of his characters and their nuanced relationships with one another, Marbrook reminds me of Hemingway and LeCarré. This is a simple, powerful tale of friendship in strange places, a magical story of transformation in the streets and tenements of Hells Kitchen and in the underbelly of a man's soul. I loved Saraceno. I think you will, too.

Djelloul Marbrook quasi-autobiographical novel Saraceno is the story of Billy Salviati, a young and attractive hit-man for the mob and possesses a notable gift for friendship. A fascinating read, Saraceno reveals the origins of Billy's mob nickname, Saraceno, bestowed upon him by the mafia don, John Altobene, and which may be taken as a compliment while retaining unique connotations. Not just another run-of-the-mill mafia novel, Saraceno is very strongly recommended as a remarkable crafted tale that will have a particular appeal for readers who appreciate the unique tale of a Mafia thug's transformation under the influence of an elderly woman who herself was once a slave-assistant to the infamous Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and survived to mentor her hit-man protege in New York.

I loved the way we get inside Billy's mind only at the very beginning, Later on, and through most of the book, he is sympatheitc in his way and certainly fascinating, but we never know what he is thinking. That worked for me, because, scary as he is, I didn't really want to know what he was thinking, but was more than happy to observe him.
I was also impressed by the fact that I haven't ever met him before in fiction. When you read novel after novel, year after year---and some of the best stuff--this is no mean feat on the part of the author.

Great read !! A very specific time and place recalled through the sepia lens of time. Colorful characters who achieve self awareness with a clarity that is only possible in fiction. Violence as a business technique done without emotion or tittilation. Achieves what a novella should - taking the reader away from the present to a New York where newspaper buyers are known by name and daily interactions create a community. Enjoy.

In "Saraceno," Djelloul Marbrook has crafted an entirely new variety of gangster tale. The story of a Mafia hit man and his friend, the grandson of the godfather, as each searches for his own true path, this compact novella is also a glass through which we see its author. "Saraceno" is 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. This love is, 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 Marbrook's narrative, "Il Saraceno" is the secret nickname given to the handsome and deadly Billy Salviati by his Mafia master, connoting both menace and respect--the historical view of the Sicilians toward their one-time rulers, the Arabs. Billy's life changes, as do the lives of his few friends, when he meets an elderly Jewish woman and is introduced to a library of the best writing and a rooftop full of roses. In an economical, erudite voice powered by an awesome vocabulary, Marbrook weaves bright strands of alchemy, art, literature, and religion into a dark Hell's Kitchen fabric.

If you're an aficionado of the recent spate of gangster yarns masquerading as psychological explorations while glorifying brutality, "Saraceno" may leave your bloodlust unfulfilled. This is no "Sopranos," no "Goodfellas," no "Godfather Part X." A nasty beating or two are in full view, but the much bloodier doings we know to be the currency of that world stay off-screen. 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 appreciated by those who prefer their reading tightly pigeonholed.

Djelloul (Del) Marbrook is the kind of writer I take real pleasure in discovering: a Hudson Valley neighbor and a mature artist whose rich body of work is finally coming to light. Marbrook's poetry collection, "Far From Algiers," is the 2007 winner of the Wick Poetry Prize and will be published in September 2008 by Kent State University Press. Other publications, both fiction and poetry, are forthcoming, and his blog is always insightful. [...].