Conversation with Johnny

A powerful, funny novel. Preceded The Sopranos & Analyze This - From the author: Conversation with Johnny is very special to me because it constitutes at least my own dual cultural nature, the writer and the individual of power, the local gangster whom most of us experienced in the old neighborhoods. Here, they merge into one. Out of this duo comes, I hope, a kind of closure on the stereotype we also all know, that of the godfather myth. On an exalted plain above all of this, to my...
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A powerful, funny novel. Preceded The Sopranos & Analyze This - From the author: Conversation with Johnny is very special to me because it constitutes at least my own dual cultural nature, the writer and the individual of power, the local gangster whom most of us experienced in the old neighborhoods. Here, they merge into one. Out of this duo comes, I hope, a kind of closure on the stereotype we also all know, that of the godfather myth. On an exalted plain above all of this, to my great pleasure, is the alluring, elusive woman.The plot of Valerio's novel is refracted through a series of vignettes relayed through the narrator's conversations with an approachable mafia don (the titular Johnny) and the narrator's lover, a married woman nicknamed Lefty living a quiet life of married desperation (until she meets the narrator). Like a beam of sunlight that bends, separates into colors, and then reunites after passing through a variety of media, the narrator's conversations express a conflicted relationship with love (not only of women, he tells us, but "the way I view everything.")