I read The Sicilian in June. It’s well written and a fun read, another Puzo Godfather novel.
The book strands Michael Corleone between two ways of living: a belief that turns a bandit into a legend, and the older law of the Mafia.
Salvatore Guiliano, Puzo’s folk hero, loses his fear of death early. He doesn’t court it. The fear the rest of us carry has left him. Everyone near him feels the absence. They follow a man who has stopped flinching and robs the barons to feed them. A whole island builds a myth on one. Belief like that moves people. It moves them wherever it points, which isn’t always somewhere good.
Michael’s own family lives the other way, the Corleones among the wider Sicilian Mafia. Not lawlessness but a rival law: silence before the state, loyalty to the family, respect paid and debts kept, every quarrel settled inside the code instead of a courtroom. Don Croce, the boss who shadows Guiliano, goes by the Don of Peace. He keeps it on the Mafia’s terms, for the Mafia’s gain. It has no use for a man who fights for anyone but its own.
Michael is a Corleone. Blood and name hold him on the family’s side. But Guiliano pulls at him the whole way, a believer he half-wishes he could be. That puts him in the middle. The old name for it is practical wisdom, the mean between the pure thing and the safe one.
The book sets all this up and then stands back. I finished it sure of where I’d stand and no clearer on what I’d do there.