Dear readers,
This week’s theme is “strong independent females,” featuring a novel about a madwoman and a true-crime account of a mob murderess.
Enjoy — if you dare.
—Molly
When it arrived from eBay, my copy of “Auntie Mame” was so feeble that the paper crumbled as I turned each page, causing the book to physically vanish at exactly the rate it was mentally incorporated. The resulting paper flakes were so tiny that I may have inhaled a few, which would make me the last person on earth to consume this particular copy of the book — in both senses! How special.
The novel’s title page calls it “AN IRREVERENT ESCAPADE.” Here’s what it declines to revere: childhood, parenthood, heterosexuality, decorum, common sense and other such hallmarks of respectable midcentury existence.
Patrick is 10 years old in 1929 when his father kicks the bucket. He is sent to Manhattan to live with his Auntie Mame, a tigress who paints her fingernails green and sleeps on black satin sheets. Mame considers 1 p.m. to be “morning,” 11 a.m. to be “early morning” and 9 a.m. to be “the middle of the night.” She is a tornado and Patrick is a lawn chair sucked into her updraft.
Of course there’s a movie of “Auntie Mame” and a Broadway musical and then a movie-of-the-musical, but for sheer density of epigrammatic comedy you gotta start with the source material. (Description of Mame’s mother-in-law: “She was built along the lines of a General Electric refrigerator and looked like a cross between Caligula and a cockatoo.”)
Read if you like: Costume jewelry, cats, the poetry of Catullus, trompe l’oeil
Available from: Free online or check your library
In 2015 a priest flew across the Southern Italian town of Castellammare di Stabia in a helicopter spraying holy water over 65,000 people as a symbolic exorcism. This “crime-ridden backwater” is where the journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau interviews Assunta “Pupetta” Maresca (1935-2021), a lady mob boss famous for murdering a guy who ordered a hit on her husband. Pupetta was 18 years old and six months pregnant when she pumped 29 bullets into her victim. In the courtroom she screamed, “I killed for love!”
Glamour and ruthlessness are attractive qualities — always have been, always will be. How else can you explain the preponderance of films and books about organized crime in Italy? I doubt it was the economic and extrajudicial functions of the mob that inspired Francis Ford Coppola!
This biography of Pupetta is a colorful addition to the canon. Do not sit down with the book thinking it will unravel stereotypes. (Page 16: A guy named, no kidding, “Big Tony” is cut out of a protection racket and orders a hit on another guy who meets his end while peeling an orange at a Neapolitan vegetable market.) Do sit down with the book if you are interested in rigid hierarchies, ornate and poetic uses of language (especially when it comes to nicknames), and the art of cultivating and defending one’s reputation.
Read if you like: “The Bacchae,” Camille Paglia, rock operas, bellowing
Available from: Penguin Books