Djelloul Marbrook

When I was a book review editor for The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal & Sentinel back in the late 1960s I occasionally got a review that showed telltale signs of having been cobbled together from the book jacket and publisher’s press kit. I don’t remember reporters ever doing that, but a few academics did. It was a bummer because I not only had to junk the review, I had to cook up an excuse for not using it so as not to ruffle the feathers of a cheat. Then, if I really wanted the book reviewed, I had to find an honest reader.

I had usually read a review or two before my own contributor weighed in. The job sometimes woke me up in the middle of the night because I hated to pan books. I especially hated savage or snide reviews that did a better job describing the reviewer’s adolescence than the book’s supposed demerits. My greatest pleasure in that job was a reviewer finding some unique aspect of a book that even its publicists missed. I guess my biggest failing in that job was that, with limited space, I reviewed entirely too much poetry.

Having had this experience, I was thrilled this week when The Midwest Book Review reviewed my novel, Saraceno. The reviewer celebrated Hettie Warshaw, the aged magus who had been Josef Mengele’s slave-assistant at Auschwitz. Much of the book’s wisdom, such as it is, resides in Hettie, in what she made of her horrific life, and I was gratified that the reviewer had savored this. If Saraceno is ever filmed Hettie will have to be played by someone like the mature Joan Plowright or Olympia Dukakis, someone who understands that even horror is good for a laugh.

Back in Winston-Salem I never envisioned that a book of my own would ever be reviewed. I had many failings, but I knew I had nothing to say. I would have rather walked the plank than have a book of mine reviewed, especially considering how snarky many reviewers are. I tried to keep the snarks at bay. I considered them worse than the horse’s asses who waste twenty-one precious inches to tell you how bad is a movie that ought to have been ignored in the first place. Sounds familiar, right?

Some folks are doing a lot of clucking and tsk-tsking about the inevitable decline of the language due to the anarchy of the Internet. They obviously haven’t been sloshing through some of the crapola coming out of the Big Six publishing houses with all their vaunted resources and tastemaking apparatchiks. I see a lot of clunk and bunk on the Web, to be sure, but I’ve been seeing it on the printed page all my life. The spectacle of big-shot publishers complaining about the absence of gatekeeping in cyberspace is not particularly compelling in view of their own performance. But a market society has to savor hypocrisy in a vast array of disguises.

I’m happy to share The Midwest Review’s review of Saraceno with you, and I’ve enrolled them among my growing list of hyper-linked friends over to your right on this blogroll.

Djelloul Marbrook’s quasi-autobiographical novel Saraceno is the story of Billy Salviati, a young and attractive hit-man for the mob who 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 remarkably 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.